Toucan: What are you working on right now?

Chris: I’m working on the first half of layouts for Daredevil #27.

Toucan: And how far ahead is that in the schedule for you? What month will that be released?

Chris: I can’t even keep track. I just turned in the cover for #30, I guess a week and a half ago. So the covers have to be done three months in advance and the issues are usually done maybe a month or a month and a half. We’re thinking way out already. We’re already talking about what’s going to happen past Daredevil #30. So it’s sort of hard to keep track of all of it. I set reminders on my phone to let me know when issues are coming out so I can Tweet about it, or otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep track at all. I check Man Without Fear and The Other Murdock Papers online. This is where I get my Daredevil news to help me keep track of what I’m doing.

Toucan: You have to look on the Internet to see what you’re doing next.

Chris: Yeah, pretty much.

Toucan: Are you staying with Daredevil indefinitely?

Chris: Yeah. I’m taking a couple issues off for paternity leave and Javier Rodriguez is going to draw issues #28 and #29 and then I’m on from issue #30 for as long as readers will put up with me.

Toucan: I think that’s going to be a very long time. Have you been drawing all your life?

Chris: Well, as far back as I can remember. I got into comics at about 5 or 6 but I remember drawing before that. It was just stick figures and Muppets and stuff like that, but it was comics that really put me on the right path.

Toucan: Do you remember some of your first comic books as a kid?

Chris: I do, actually. My first comic was Batman when I was either 5 or 6. My grandma bought me one of those three packs that you used to get at grocery stores back in the day, and I was like, “They make comics out of these?!” All I’d known was the Super Friends cartoon and I’d had the toys and stuff, I just didn’t know that they came from anywhere. I didn’t realize that there was source material. I just thought that that was just another cartoon that I liked. I thought it was just like Voltron or Robotech, just the stuff that I liked watching. I didn’t realize that there was more that I could get out of it, and I think it’s one thing to see them moving around on screen, it’s another to sort of experience a comic book. You sort of put yourself into it, and at 6 years old I was like this is what I want to do. I don’t know what you call it, I don’t know what it is, but I want to make these.

Toucan: So you realized at a very early age once you started reading comics that somebody actually sat down and drew this and wrote this . . .

Chris: Well I knew that somebody had to make it, it was drawn. I knew that somebody did it, but it took a few years for me to figure out that it was an actual career that someone could have. I knew that it’s what I wanted to do, but if anybody asked me at 7 or 8 years old what I wanted to do I would just say that I wanted to be a cop, because Batman was friends with cops. That was the closest job that I could make sense of. So probably about 10 I realized that this was a job that I could actually have and I started going for it. I found that there was a local St. Louis convention when I was a kid. I think it was Greater Eastern Convention, GEC, something like that, and I talked my parents into driving me the hour and a half away to the airport Holiday Inn where they had the local convention. I started meeting writers and artists and I would just bombard them with as many questions about how they did what they did as I possibly could. There were a couple of artists that were kind enough to tell me what size paper they drew on, and they looked at my Trapper Keeper binder full of looseleaf copy paper and told me what I really needed to be doing if that’s what I wanted to do. So every three or six months there was a convention that I would go to and pester these guys, and I kept doing it month after month after month, and at 15 I got my first published work.

Toucan: Was there somebody at those conventions who was really helpful who was a pro?

Chris: Yeah, Mike Doherty. He was drawing Conan for I think Marvel at the time, and he was the first one to say, “No, you didn’t draw this.” So I drew a Batman sketch for him at his table and he gave me some Marvel board to take home with me and try and draw on, but I was just so in awe of this piece of blank paper that said “Marvel” on the top of it, I couldn’t draw on it. I was just like, “Oh, my god, this is what people draw on!” So I think I still have it somewhere. There’s one aged old piece of white Bristol that I got.

Toucan: With nothing on it.

Chris: With nothing on it, except for the blue lines and the Marvel logo. That was enough for me. From that I couldn’t draw on it.

Toucan: It’s like the Golden Fleece.

Chris: Yeah, it really was. That was what I needed to try. They didn’t make 11 x 17 paper for kids, so I got 11 x 14. I think that was the closest size they had that was just like poster board, and that’s what I started drawing on when I was a kid and going to shows. That was my portfolio . . . a bunch of Bristol board from—I say Bristol, it was poster board from Wal-Mart—that I was drawing Fantastic Four and Batman and stuff on.