Toucan: Where did comics start for you? What are your earliest comic memories?

Cliff: My earliest comics memories, like actually reading comics . . . I have vague memories of seeing comics around but I didn’t read them until my brother brought them home and I believe it was sometime around 1983, 1984. I remember the specific comics. There was a Fantastic Four comic and an X-Men comic and then after we read those we were off to the races. John Byrne was writing and drawing Fantastic Four. It was Chris Claremont and Paul Smith on X-Men, and it’s funny to think about that now, because those comics have really defined for me a lot of artistically how I handle comics and my storytelling. I didn’t realize it for quite a while, but then looking back and rereading those comics a couple years ago I realized that a lot of my storytelling choices come out of the clarity that you would get from a John Byrne comic, and a lot of my drawing comes from that kind of elegant drawing that Paul Smith would do. So those comics are really important to me for my development.

Toucan: When I was looking at your work in preparation for this interview, I looked over things like Wonder Woman, Greendale, and Doctor Thirteen, and I was surprised at how much your work reminds me of Paul Smith.

Cliff: Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean it’s kind of been on a pendulum sometimes. My work gets further away from it and then sometimes it kind of swings back to it, but I think he’s definitely a huge influence. And I think we probably also like a lot of the same artists as well, so that there’s just gravity to it that I can’t escape.

Toucan: Who else do you look at as major influences?

Cliff: Alex Toth, David Mazzucchelli, Steve Rude, the Hernandez Brothers. The Hernandez Brothers particularly I think in the last, well, when I started reading comics again after college. I had gotten back into comics in college and then after I graduated I realized I wanted to work in comics and kind of went on my own comics grad school course, just reading everything that had been recommended to me over the years that I heard was good. Finding Love and Rockets was an epiphany, just seeing these two guys, two men of color, making this fantastic book by their own rules and with these really great art styles. To this day it motivates me to do better work and to hopefully so something of my own that’s like Love and Rockets.

Toucan: So you definitely gravitate towards artists that have a clarity and a—not to make this sound like a bad word—simplicity to their work.

Cliff: Yeah, I like simplicity because it communicates quickly and easily without a lot of fuss. You know I think that the main goal of all this is storytelling. It’s not to sit back and “ooh” and “ah” at the picture. It’s to get the story across, and you know those artists and guys like Noel Sickles and Milt Caniff, Frank Robbins . . . there’s some Italian artists that I really love; Dino Battaglia in particular is a huge influence for me right now. Moebius . . . you know the one thing that they all have in common is they’re excellent storytellers.

Toucan: When you were reading comics as a kid did you realize at one point in time that somebody wrote and drew these and this is what you wanted to do as a career?

Cliff: I knew really well that there were people doing this. As soon as I started reading comics as I kid, I think you know it’s like getting into sports or something and learning who’s on each team and that kind of thing. So I knew who all the individual names were. I knew that, oh, I like this person’s art and this person’s writing, but I never considered it as a job. It was kind of abstract for me. I knew these things were made, I knew someone had to draw them, but I never thought that it could be a job for me and it took a long time before I could kind of accept that. I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a kid at all, but artist was not necessarily at the top of that list, even though I was drawing a lot.

Toucan: But eventually you went to Harvard and started there in filmmaking, right?

Cliff: Yes, and I think that’s what started me on a path back to comics, because I wanted to tell stories. Film seemed to be—at that time—the most interesting to me, but after doing a bit more film and learning about cameras and having to collaborate with actors and writers and just a whole team, I realized how big a production a film actually is, and I wanted more control over the storytelling. I could tell stories on my own without worrying about cameras screwing up on me, without worrying about film going bad, and it was just a much smaller, simpler process.

Toucan: So basically you realized at one point you could make your own movies on paper.

Cliff: Yeah, pretty much.

Toucan: You started in comics as an assistant editor at Disney Adventures magazine and then at Vertigo. Was that a conscious decision on your part to enter comics that way instead of just starting out with submitting samples and going the art route?

Cliff: I knew I wanted to draw, but I also knew that my work wasn’t professional. Knowing that I wanted to be in comics in some capacity, I tried to get any job I could, and editorial was difficult to get into because there weren’t many spots, but it seemed like a natural fit. So I sought out editorial jobs at first because I felt like I would learn things by doing that that I wouldn’t learn otherwise, and at the same time I could continue to work on my art until it was something that someone could publish.

Toucan: That must have been an incredible learning experience for you to see all this art as it came in every day and see how different artists tell stories.

Cliff: Yes. It started with Disney where we—Heidi MacDonald and I—worked with a lot of veteran artists who knew what they were doing, so I very quickly got a sense of how to do things, what good storytelling was. She also had these great cheat sheets that were made by a Disney artist at some point about how to compose pages for comics. How you’d want to leave space for balloons, how you’d want to move the action, and how you’d want to play with perspective to keep it interesting. Through that I learned what real clarity in storytelling was. We also worked with Jeff Smith reprinting Bone in Disney Adventures magazine. So I got to talk with him a little bit and we saw copies of his full-size pages come into the office and I could stare at those for hours. After that, at Vertigo, one of the jobs of the assistant editor is to kind of log in some of the artwork that comes every day from the different pencilers and letterers and inkers. So I’d see that and compare it with the script and see how things changed or how the penciler would interpret the script. So each day was a different variation on that and I learned a lot there as well.

Toucan: So was there a moment when you felt, okay I’m ready to start to do this after looking at everybody else’s work?

Cliff: No, there wasn’t. There was a feeling that I wanted to do it and I started to get smaller jobs internally at DC while I was working there. I did a couple of the “Big Book” series because a friend of mine was editing them, but you know, there’s feeling like you’re ready and then actually being ready, and it was difficult for me to get bigger jobs because I was on staff. I had a 9 to 5 job, which meant that I’d have to go home and work at night in order to get anything done, which meant that I needed a much longer lead time than you would give any other full-time freelance artist. Occasionally offers would come in or someone would say, “Oh, we thought of you, but then we went with this guy,” and I appreciate that they even told me, but after a few of those I started saying well, maybe I should think about this. Then, as it happened, they rearranged the department and I took that as a sign that I could go, because I was being moved to a different editor and the time that was going to be spent getting used to their books and their creative teams meant that it was going to be another six months before I was really comfortable, so why not take this an opportunity to leave and just double down on the idea of making comics.