EP06 - Chris Bachalo
CHRIS BACHALO -
INTERVIEW 2025
Chris, first I would like to thank you for taking the time for this. When I set out to create a sub blog for my website to talk with my favorite comic creators, never in a million years have I imagined that in just a span of a couple of months I would be able to have some of my biggest influences here, so thank you again!
As I mentioned previously, ever since I could remember, been a lover of comics. As a kid I got into collecting Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men and later Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimates. It is here where I first became familiar with your work, more precisely Ultimate X-Men #18 and then in Ultimate War. Your art immediately impressed me with its rich dynamic quality and noir-ish vibe and the great use of negative space and chiaroscuro.
I want to start by asking you what was the first comic that you read and when did you decide you’re going to work in comics?
Okay, I bought two. Back in the mid-seventies, when I was around ten years old, my family and I were living in Fountain Valley, California. For a period of about ten years we’d commute via car back and forth to Manitoba, Canada. This is where I was born and where my parents grew up. They had a summer honeybee business. I know a lot about honey bees!
It took us about three days to make the drive from Southern California to Manitoba and my sister and I would always be looking for things to do while we were captive in the back seat of the car. I usually read books and played cards or enjoyed checking out the scenery. In September 1974, on the way back to California, we stopped at drug store to pick up a few supplies for the trip back to Socal and I happened upon a comic book rack. I didn’t know what comic books were but they had cool pictures on them. I was huge into monsters like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Gamera, the Wolfman and dinosaurs. Two of the comics had monsters on them. One was Swamp Thing issue 12, with Swamp Thing fighting a dinosaur, and the other was Man-Thing issue 9. He was fighting big, monster tree. How cool is that? I picked them up and comics quickly became a hobby.
A few years later while in high schooI I decided that I would pursue drawing comics. A huge moment of serendipity here. Changed my life. I was around 15 years old, in high school and it was June an we were taking our finals. I had an open hour and my friend said that he was taking his art final. His teacher was really cool and that I could sit in on the class. I watched the kids take their finals and was blown away and had an epiphany. I decided that my dream job was to become a comic book artist and I signed up for two art classes in the fall! Sometime wonder if i had not had that hour open and my friend hadn’t offered to me to sit in on his final if I would have ended up as an artist—
You worked on Shade, the Changing Man, created by the legendary Steve Ditko. Can you talk about how that came about and what was the process like? Understandably your style is very different from how it transformed over the time.
Yeah, so post high School I attended California State University, Long Beach and went through the illustration program. I was determined to work in comics so— whenever I could— I would apply a comic book styled theme to the assignments I was working on.
The last semester of the program was an open course in which you could do whatever you wanted to round out your portfolio. I made a comic. I had my friend write a story that featured Iron Man and Deathlok and post graduation sent it to every comic book publisher that i could find. I was rejected by all of them. One publisher sent me a photocopied book by Andrew Loomis—and shared with me that I needed to learn how to draw!
So, back at it.
I got an art job painting ceramic pots and --on the side—started working on a comic written by my friend Michael called Broken Hearts. About six months later DC sent me a post card asking if I had any new material to share and I sent them what I had completed on Broken Hearts. About a week later Richard Bruning over at DC (who is Karen Berger’s husband, the editor of books like Animal Man, Sandman and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing) called me and shared that they were looking for an artist to draw a new book called Shade the Changing Man— and would I like to try out for it?
Shade was perfect book for me to work on. I really enjoyed the stories Peter Milligan was writing. They allowed me to express myself, be creative and really stretch out my drawing style— which changed a great deal over the four years i was on the book.
You and Joe Kelly (who took over Amazing Spider-Man last November) worked on one of the most amazing comics I’ve seen, Steampunk, I love the details and the world and I truly believe it was ahead of its time. so I wanted to ask, how did that come about? Can you tell me about its inception and perhaps what were ideas that didn’t make it?
Kind of an interesting series of events that led to the Steampunk creation. Joe, myself and Steven Seagle happened to be attending Oz con in Australia together--first time meeting Joe—and both had just departed writing their X-Men books.
When I returned home I was moved off of Uncanny and offered a Magneto mini series. Barely half an hour later I was contacted by Scott Dunbier, the editor over at Wildstorm/Cliffhanger, and he asked me If I’d like to join. I said yes! Wow!
I had been thinking about a creator owned series and had touched base with an animator at Blizzard Games who wanted to make a Steampunk styled game—and showed me the book Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki. My wife, Helen, mentioned that Joe might a good person to bring on as a writer. I went to Joe and shared the idea and he agreed to come on and write. It was a Steampunk theme and as we put the story together thought we’d simply call it by that name. The opening story is basically world building—the origin of our Steampunk world.
Joe is crazy interesting and full of ideas beyond anything i could imagine and had a lot of interesting visual ideas—and I tried to get it all in—which was why the book was as dense as it was. It was a joy!
Speaking of Amazing Spider-Man, your cover (and work) in Amazing Spider-Man #555 is one of my favorites, I got a couple of nerdy questions, but one of them would be, what was your process creating that cover, can you take me through it?
Its really nice when I have access to the story for covers—as I prefer story centric covers--so, yeah, this is pretty much an action sequence that reflects whats going on with the interior story—just trying to keep things as dynamic as possible—going to back to some of my Michael Golden and Frank Frazetta influences.
Pencil hardness varies on the time of year. Usually an H or an F. When it gets cold I ‘ll go a little softer—
Typically the process on covers is to create a concept —pencilled on paper—then scan into photoshop—on which I’ll tweek, adjust and color to a point where feel good about showing it to my editor for approval.
With approval, I’ll enlarge and transfer the concept to fit the full board, pencil it up and —in this case —ship the original pencils to Tim Townsend to ink. He’ll send me a scan of the completed inks and I’ll color on photoshop and turn into my editor.
The Amazing Spider-Man #555 - Art by: Chris Bachalo
One of the tastiests combos, like peanut butter and chocolate, is you on Witchblade. My favorite page is this one from the 10th Anniversary issue, Witchblade #92. What memories do you have creating that page?
Oh, yeah. Super proud of that spread. Worked really hard on it—the colors took forever. Its an origin sequence and I thought it would be nice to blend the story beats into one big, double page, montage. The “Witchblade cave girl” and tiger are a direct influence from the Frazetta Huntress painting. I’ve had a poster of that image hanging on my wall just about my entire life—still do—and it was really nice to play homage to it here.
Double page spread from Witchblade #92 - Art by: Chris Bachalo
As mentioned above, because I grew up first and foremost on those, I wanted to circle back to this one: Can you talk about your time on Ultimate X-Men / Ultimate War and what it was like working on those titles? Any ideas that perhaps you and Mark Millar talked about but didn’t make it into the story?
When my contract was up at Cliffhanger, i stopped producing Steampunk. I can’t recall the exact events but I ended up having an opportunity to work on Ultimate X-Men with Mark for two issues—which lead to the Ultimate War book. I was never in communication with Mark. It was a situation in which everything was already set up and the scripts were written and there was nothing for me to do other than draw the book.
The Magik variant of Realm of X #1 is really great looking, I love the macabre and the aforementioned chiaroscuro. The same can be said after reading your X-Men. Who are some of the artists both in comics and beyond that inspire you? I seem to notice flavors of Alphonse Mucha, Caravaggio and even Joe Madureria and some manga in your artworks.
The artists that had the most influence on me early on were Frank Frazetta, Michael Golden and Bill Sienkiewicz. Frazetta was the first artist I became aware of when i was a kid. Golden was drawing Micronauts, Marvel Fanfare and Dr Strange and doing covers for Marvel and Bill’s time on the Moon Knight book inspired me beyond words. If you were to look at my style during the eighties it looked just like Bill’s, ink splattered Moon Knight pages.
But you could name just about any artist and they probably made some kind of impression on me at some point. I read a lot of Conan books so John Buscema was a big influence. Dave KcKean, P Craig Russel, Mike Mignola. Yes, Joe Mad when I was on Gen X. Of late, Eduardo Risso, Ashley Wood and Jae Lee are making an impression.
Real of X #1 Variant Cover - Art by: Chris Bachalo
Totally nerdy question, what does your sketchbook look like?
I confess that I don’t actively work in a sketchbook. My high school art teacher generously gave one to me when I graduated High School and he wrote on the inside front cover “work to the last page” and I did—but I never started another.
Personally, I don’t care for drawing in books as I find them clumsy.
And theres this—
I view what I do as a business—its what I do for a living—and over the years have figured out ways to monetize every step the process.
For me, the action of drawing requires a lot energy—and i dont want to use up that good creative time on something like a sketchbook —that has value as practice but doesn’t have any monetary value.
In its place, what I do for fun and play as warm ups—to get the creativity going—is draw small pictures of characters. Whatever I like. I then take the ones that are successful and put them up for sale on my website store. They are a big part of my income and fans enjoy them. They sell every fast from my store.
If you were to visit my studio—I have a drawer in my flat files that are full of unsuccessful drawings. There are hundreds of them—all scabby and half done. I guess that would be the equivalent of what would be my sketchbook. Haha. Sometimes they sit half drawn for years and I look at them from time to time—and sometimes —when the time is right—I figure out how to finish them.
And I apply this to everything I create. When I was working concepts for Dr Strange I’ll draw them as live art and take them to point where they’re pretty tight—like a convention drawing. There’s a collector audience that really enjoys these kind of drawings. Is a great ancillary source of income. Personally, I just bought several Matteo Scalera concept drawings. They’re fantastic and not crazy expensive.
Same thing with covers. I complete finished concepts on paper. I sell a few and keep others—to maybe sell later.
All of this creates several several avenues of income—creates several bites out the apple. I get a rate for creating the cover from the publisher, a concept that has value and an original published inked drawing that I can sell if I choose.
The bottom line for me is that I want to make a good living as an artist—and maximizing my creative energy each day is very important to me.
I understand the point of sketchbooks, and know many artists fervently keep them, but its not something that I’ve ever embraced.
As an artist, I feel like we don’t really have a favorite in the sense, as which is drawn “best”, what I have for example are works that can be tied to an emotion that inspired me or how I felt that day when I was designing a poster, so my question would be what are some of your treasured artworks that you’ve created so far and why?
Wow, really tough question to answer and I confess that i dont have a good answer for this—as every book that I’ve worked on has some kind of sentimental value to me. My first book, Shade the Changing Man —I learned a lot about drawing. Death the High Cost of Living. That changed my life forever. I knew I’d never have to look for work again after that was published. Generation X was the first consistent big seller for me—my first time spent in the “super hero” genre--learning how to tell stories for that kind of audience. The Witching Hour and Steampunk were creative high points for me. I could go on and on. They are all my kids and I love them.
Generation X - Art by: Chris Bachalo
The Witching Hour - Art by: Chris Bachalo
If you could recommend a comic book to someone who never saw your work before, which one would be? Alternatively, which is the one comic that you didn’t like for any reason, that you worked on?
Death:The High Cost of Living. With that book— more than any other—I’ve heard many deep, personal stories from people that visit with me and how that story affected them.
Death the High Cost of Living #3 - Art by: Chris Bachalo
I’ve been very lucky to work with iconic writers and terrific editors and have enjoyed almost of all of my time on every title. There was one book that I asked off of—and out of respect of the people that worked on that title and the people that enjoyed the book I’m going to refrain from sharing what it is. Sorry about that—
With the rise of AI now making the headlines, what are, for you, the pros and cons of working traditionally versus digitally? How does the process differ and what would you recommend watching out for in this regard? I mainly work digitally, creating digital paintings and/or using stock photos for the movie posters and my own work.
If I were ever to teach an art class the first thing that would say is that there are no rules when it comes to the process of producing art. That’s personal. Whatever it takes for you to achieve what you have in mind—thats up to you. Go for it. Be you!
I grew up creating live art. Pencil and paint on paper. When Photoshop came along I incorporated it into my routine. I color with it and it's an important part of the conceptual process. Depending on the the subject , there are occasions in which some covers I’ve created that are entirely digital—but I always favor live art. It’s where my comfort level is, what I grew up on. And getting back to the business part , I think, maybe a third of my income comes from original art sales. Its a big source of revenue for me.
I follow many artists on social media and —as a collector of original art—I’m sad when I learn that they are digital and that there’s no original art to buy.
I think that AI generated art is a toy. It’ll get boring pretty fast. I’m sure some aspects of the medium will find an audience. I see that for example that there are many online t-shirt companies starting up that sell AI generated art for their t-shirts.
Right now I don’t think that it will take over in comics as I think that readers enjoy the human aspect—but I’m sure there will be a few publishers that will give it a try. A younger audience might embrace them.
It might be because I follow many artists on social but it seems that there’s a resurgence in live artists—people that create original drawings and paintings and sell them at online stores or at galleries or at shows. I actively enjoy buying art. What to you think?
I remain conflicted on this, because I see as a lot of people, agencies taking the “easy” route and use AI generated pictures for their projects instead of real artists or ask artists to touch up their AI pictures, which is always a bummer. On the other side Photoshop’s Generative Fill is a toy, as you mentioned, that speeds up the workflow, however that just helps me make something quicker, which I could do otherwise as well.
On the part that there’s a resurgence of real artists, I agree, noticed that as well!
Do you have plans to publish creator owned comic books in the near future?
Yes. I’d like to finish Steampunk and I’d like to try writing and drawing a series of some kind. Probably something sci-fi. But how near in the future is uncertain. I’m kind of running out of time—just turned 60—so maybe not too far off—haha!
Last question, what was the best advice you got?
While in University , an instructor in one of my drawing classes said, “draw with the confidence that you sign your name.” That was a profound thought for me and its remained with me to this day. I work to that end—
Thank you Chris, for answering my questions. I know you’re really busy, so just simply taking the time to do this is much appreciated.
Hope you’re having a great day and can’t wait to see what you do next!
My Pleasure. Sorry for the long wait on this. Best of success to you!
You can follow Chris Bachalo on X(Twitter) and Instagram.
