Wow, thanks so much! That’s really nice to hear. As far as comics go, it really got going with Barbarian Lord, a character that represented my love for the medieval Icelandic Sagas and Norse mythology. Shortly after that I collaborated with Nathan Fairbairn on his story Lake of Fire for Image Comics, and later a handful of short story projects with Boom. Currently I’m working on Folklords with Matt Kindt for Boom. Simmering on the back burner are Metal Quest with Tom Pappalardo and a Barbarian Lord sequel.I’d say Lake of Fire. Nathan wrote up a great story there.Well, comics involve a whole lot more drawings. It’s generally a good amount more work all around, for me anyway, but it’s the best format for the stories I’m most interested in working on these days. The space you have to develop characters, put them into interesting scenarios, and see how they fare is definitely greater in comics.Both in turns! More exciting though. Exciting wins out.Thanks again! I’d definitely be up to it.I got a message from Mike asking if I’d be interested while I was out raking leaves last fall. It was very early on and the story hadn’t been written yet, but I said yes very quickly and then raked the rest of the yard with newfound zeal. It’s time to rake again so I need more exciting news to make the work less dreadful. Ha.That's absolutely true. I would have never attempted Barbarian Lord without being inspired by Mike's work on Hellboy. It probably should have been more daunting than it was, but Mike was so welcoming and completely clear about things he liked or didn’t like that it went about as smoothly as a comic book can go. I definitely felt like I had freedom and trust to go at it however I felt best. I should add that the Dark Horse editors Katii O’Brien and Jenny Blenk also helped make it a great experience.Acrylics were what I used to for children’s lit, but I’ve been all digital with comics. I do most of my sketching in Corel Painter as I’ve modified and gotten used to the brushes there. I use Clip Studio for final line work. I keep thinking to switch to a hybrid process of digital pencil and traditional inks and hope to make that jump before too long. In fact, that was my plan for this issue initially, and I bought a handful of pens, brushes, and board for it. It'd be hard to go back to traditional pencils, as digitally sketching is how I think now. Resizing things, moving panels around on the fly–it's all part of a fluid decision-making process, especially in the earliest layouts. I'm not saying it's better, only that it's now a very familiar way of working.I suppose that would be Barbarian Lord. It was a tribute to all of my favorite things in both the writing and in the art from the medieval Icelandic Sagas to Conan to Hellboy to Bone. It started out with it as a self-published book and I had zero thought as to who the audience for it might be, only that it worked for me. For that reason and that it’s a heavy tribute to the unvarnished tone of the medieval Icelandic Sagas, I think it’s destined for a fairly narrow group of readers. That said, I’m still fairly proud of it. I’ll get back to him at some point.Ha! Never actually mistaken, just a lot of jokes. My main concern is Matthew Dow Smith. Though I like him as a man and highly respect him as an artist, we have a date with broadswords on a Scottish heath. Matt looks pretty tough, but I’ll start training at some point, or at least start imagining a training montage set to Queen.It’s not so hard to look intently at other people’s characters and try to get something of their likeness, especially as I have so many Hellboy books here in the studio with all those characters to look at. I think the real trick is getting at the right feel of the character while keeping in your own way of drawing. Whether I pulled that off okay or not is for others to decide. It’s something I certainly hope to get better at.First off, that’s great! He’s doing all he needs to be doing, drawing all the time. That’s about it.Other than that I’m not sure I have any advice useful for comics. I fell backward into them. I had been ghost-drawing chapter books for an established author/illustrator, which was sucking the artistic life out of me, when I started up Barbarian Lord. BL was more or less an effort to remember that drawing should be exciting and fun, as I was ready to hang it up with art and find something else to do. Maybe there is some kind of advice in there. Focus on making something you really enjoy, as that’s where all the good stuff you have will come out.