Michael Cho talks Jack Kirby, Darwyn Cooke, and the power of two tone coloring

To the average person trying to create a picture full of action and emotion and fluidity, the use of flat color – let alone only two flat colors – seems counter-intuitive. After all, don’t we need a full spectrum to create anything resembling what emotions truly feel like? When it comes to artists like Michael Cho, it’s clear that the average person simply hasn’t reached deep enough to see just how powerful two-tone art can be, and how contemporary the past can feel when you’re willing to pour yourself into it.

Popverse sat down on a tired Sunday afternoon with Cho at Fan Expo Portland to discuss his beginnings as a contemporary painter, emotion through lighting, and whether or not his kid thinks him doing work for the New Yorker is cool.

Popverse: We chose the end of the show to do this and now we’re both a little punchy, huh?

Michael Cho: It's not the end but it is the end. But yeah. Oof.

You've done everything across all different sorts of publishing. How did you end up in comics of all places? What had you landed there?

Yeah. It's a weird one. I came out of school to be a contemporary painter. So I was broke. Dead broke.

As contemporary painters tend to be.

Yes.I went to art college to study Contemporary Art, so I was doing installation work. You smash pottery and leave it in a pile on the ground, and then you do a weird sound poem around it.

[laughs]

But I was broke! And there was a neighbor of mine – I was living in a converted warehouse at the time – , and she said, "There's a theater company down the street looking for illustrators. You're an illustrator, right?" I had no training, so I said, "Yeah."

[laughs] “I can do anything if you can pay my rent!”

Exactly. I lied my way through the thing and showed my stuff. So then I started doing theater illustrations, which led to doing book illustrations because a friend of mine wrote a book and was like, "You want to do some drawings for me?" I was working in what I thought was my field – which was illustration– for a long while. But the thing is, I live in Toronto. And in Toronto there's a huge comics community, not just of comic fans, but professionals.

Famously so, in fact.

A lot of the artist friends that I had were comic book artists. And I'd draw in a style that's very comic booky in the first place. They were like, "Dude, you're a comic nerd and you also could draw this. Why don't you try drawing comics?" I did a bunch of indie comics and things like that, and that led to me being invited