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Interview

Jesse Thomas p2

A favorite young adult mystery novel and classic comics...

READERSVOICE.COM: Which other novels and comics have you liked over the years?

JESSE THOMAS: Dreamland Lake by Richard Peck, which I first read as a kid has really stuck with me. [A highly regarded young adult mystery novel, full of suspense. Two friends in the seventh grade find a body at Dreamland Lake, a decayed, abandoned park in Chicago.] Cerebus, Xenozoic Tales, Death Note, Silent Mobius and The Quest For The Time Bird are among my favorite comics. I always enjoy a classic Spider-Man comic from the 70s or 80s.

RV: How did you team up with Roger Crooks, when you illustrated for some of The Karentha Chronicles?

JT: He found me at Heroes Con a few years ago. He then contacted me and sent me the script. I liked it, and I’ve never written a fantasy script myself that I liked enough to illustrate. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to do something a bit different from what you would find in Night Craft.

RV: How did the creative process work when you illustrated for writer Matt Warner on the vampire hunter story for Hellbound Media’s Dawn After Dark: Kiss Me Deadly?

JT: It was pretty straightforward. I provided rough sketches based on the script, once those were approved I went to work on the finished pencilled and inked pages. Occasionally something was misinterpreted on my end since it is a British story set in Ireland, but that was not often at all.

RV: For the fifth issue of Night Craft you drew an amazing two page spread of an outer space scene. Was all this inked by hand and can you talk about how you went about this picture?

JT: Yes. it was technically all inked by hand. I just drew out a one-point perspective shot across two sheets of Bristol board. The starfield was done by hand, but that was added to the scene digitally. The double page spread was actually the second attempt at this page. The first attempt was only a single page version of the scene that I was never happy with. I did manage to digitally paste in a couple of the spaceships I drew for the first version into the two-page version.

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