- As a kid, it's just like wait, who are these people?
Who's Laser Eye Guy?
And Russian Metal Man?
And these were my nicknames for them.
And Claw Dude?
Hi, I'm Todd Knauk, and today, I'll be drawing an X-Men piece
for Marvel's 80th anniversary.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I've been drawing all my life.
Earliest memories are of drawing.
Like, age 3, scribbling in a circle.
That quickly led into drawing my favorite cartoon characters.
And one of my favorite cartoons, especially in the early '80s,
was Spider-man and his Amazing Friends.
That cartoon introduced me to the X-Men.
And those characters, the look and the design,
I wanted to learn more about these X-Men,
so I knew I had to go to the comic books.
And I was immediately hooked.
A buddy of mine in high school said,
you know, Todd, you're always reading comics
and you're always drawing.
Have you ever tried making your own comic books?
So that day, when I got home from school,
I took some printer paper, folded a few sheets in half,
and wrote and drew an eight-page story.
And it was terrible.
The art was bad, the story went nowhere,
but it was so much fun creating.
I knew that night, this was what I want
to do for the rest of my life.
I would just spend my time reading my favorite comics,
studying my favorite artists, and mimicking
what I saw them do.
There was an editor at Marvel named Renée Witterstaetter.
I would see her every convention.
So she saw my work grow and develop to a point
where I think I just wore her down.
She's, like, OK, I'll buy a one-page
gag off of you for What The--?!
So I came up with different Marvel universe jokes.
A few weeks later, she calls me up and says,
I like these two X-Men ones.
And it ran as the back cover for issue 21.
And I was still in art school at the time.
I was 21 years old, and my first paid
published work was for Marvel, and was drawing the X-Men!
For the cover, I chose right smack
dab in the middle of the '80s--
1985-era X-Men.
Really around the time that I came into reading the X-Men.
I like to just create some basic shapes that convey
the pose of the character.
Where are the bad guys?
Where's each hero?
I'll start penciling, and I'd like
to work from the foreground and work my way to the background.
Still working on different layers.
If I notice something that needs to be moved or readjusted,
it's easier to reposition them without having
to worry about messing up other lines from other characters
that are on the page.
I definitely will go into an ink stage
and bring in those black lines--
nice crisp, clean lines.
And then it's fun just tapping into kind of the classic
'80s color, but then bring it to a more modern-day tricks
that we can do with digital--
light up storms lightning bolts, or do some tricks
with Kitty's phasing.
One of the things that was a must for me,
and especially if I'm getting to do an '80s-era type cover,
was a corner box.
I love corner box art.
It was something that really struck me as a kid--
seeing all the X-Men, you know, seeing the roster there.
Being able to do my recreation of a corner box
here was definitely a lot of fun.
Gosh, with this piece there are so many
favorite elements, because this taps into so much of what
I loved as a kid, and still love here today, as an adult,
is each character holds a special connection for me.
As an awkward kid in the 1980s, struggling with being bullied,
I'd read X-Men, and they're called muties,
and freaks, and gene-jokes.
And it's, like, they're being called names, too.
But this is how they're dealing with it.
You know, they had a family, friendship sort of connection
there, that they were kind of my comic book friends.
They were people I could come home to
after a rough day of school, and I could crack open an issue,
and hang out with, you know, Nightcrawler, and Kitty Pryde,
or the New Mutants, which were the teenage team at the time,
and who I could really relate to.
I felt awkward like Cannonball, I felt shy like Cipher,
I felt like I looked weird like Nightcrawler.
You know, these characters are so real,
and struggle with such real problems.
I can relate to that.
And to work here with Marvel, here, now, for well over 10
years, it's a dream come true.
The kid in me that still lives inside here, daily
gets to come to work and have fun every day,
getting to continue to chronicle the history and the stories
of characters that I experienced,
that have meant a lot to me, and continue to mean so much to me.
I get to be that guy for another generation of Marvel readers.
Commercial art, graphic design, art director in that regard,
not something I want to do.
Have fun friends!
I'm going to continue going towards comics.
I want to be a storyteller.