Not to shake things up by sharing comics gossip, but if you’ve spent more than two seconds on the comics internet or within DC comics circles over the last decade, there’s a good chance you might have heard of this guy named Mitch Gerads. With an art style that took the scene by storm combining mid-century style and a dynamic new kind of digital feel, it’s an easy sell that Gerads is one of the most unique of the comics mainstream in the contemporary age. But where does that come from? And for that matter, where does the spark of ingenuity stem from when an artist is harking on halcyon days of art marketing past?

Popverse was fortunate to sit down with Gerads at his table at Fan Expo San Francisco to discuss how the mainstream can come to accept such a bygone era of art, and how harnessing the propaganda of mid-century advertising doesn’t always have to make for propaganda itself.

Popverse: Mitch, before we get started on anything else, talk to me a little bit about your process. Because I have heard that you do something kind of interesting with gray scaling when it comes to your coloring.

What I do is I have a very odd process where I do quick tiny thumbnails next to the script about that big, and then I kind of collage reference and drawing and all these things in Photoshop and make that a blue line. Then I do all my drawing in the ink stage. It's all digital. When I get to that final part of actual drawing, I'll do a lot of analog texture and scan it in, add it digitally. But then I've started adding all the gray tones during the line. And it just makes coloring go so much faster because all the value is already there. So coloring is kind of just flat coloring, but it looks more voluminous because I've done all the work already.

I've never heard of anybody doing any coloring like that.

Another thing I found is that I rarely ever keep my line art completely grayscale. What I'll do is when I'm coloring it – especially on things like Strange Adventures, which is set a lot more during the day – if I kind of turned my line art a little orange, it just made everything round out and more human like.

It’s kind of amazing how digital stuff like this really is sort of reinventing the wheel, isn’t it?

And what's funny is all the little techniques I use currently, every single one of them is found completely by accident. It's all just me monkeying around and then being like, oh, there we go.

How about then you tell me a little bit about your relationship with mid-century art and with 20th century artists overall. When I look at a lot of your stuff, I see Norman Rockwell, Gustav Klimt, all of these artists that are very much expressionists and modern romantics. So where does that connect for you?

That's my era. It's funny when people always talk about who are your inspirations, they always want the comic book artists, and there definitely are. But the main stuff, the stuff that I look at, and it just really excites me and gets me going is that mid-century ad illustration. Like you said, Norman Rockwell is my number one. He has this amazing way of making a single image feel like an entire story.

So that's kind of what I'm always trying to attend to and do even in panel-work. It’s something about the way things are drawn and there's this… nostalgia's not the right word because I wasn't alive, obviously – but for lack of a better term, nostalgia of that kind of perfect America that advertising art was showing. That stuff just really appeals to me. I love going to super small towns. Back when I lived in Minnesota, it's all trying to get that Norman Rockwell vibe that probably isn't real. But the ad artists made it look real.

I mean, those are references that people don't normally get. Not to disparage anybody who reads comics, of course, but it's not always the first thing that people who read comics go to is this traditional ad style art form from Norman Rockwell. [laughs]. How do you parse that for an audience that doesn't immediately go there?

Yeah. It's all just kind of blending that into the modern era of comics. I do a lot of Batman stuff, and the last thing I’d done is very dark. It is dark figuratively, but also very literally. I like Gotham being a very dark, dangerous, murky place. So it's taking those aesthetics into a world that it was kind of not built for. And for me, art is all about experimentation. When I do a cover, I rarely know exactly how I'm going to do it. I just kind of monkey around.

Makes sense. Just fiddle around until something cool happens.

I just get frustrated for hours and then all of a sudden I'm like, 'Oh wait. There it is. Okay. I'm a genius.'

So with that mid-century style, how does that play for you into how you view superheroes? Because like you said, it's this idyllic post-war all behind 'our boys in blue!' sort of mentality where everything's shiny and rose-colored.

That's all one thing to me. When I draw other people on Strange Adventures like Adam Strange, or even in One Bad Day with Riddler and Batman, it's all about humanizing. My whole approach to comics is humanizing the superhuman. Like the line I came up with my bio at some point. But there's just something about …like, I don't connect with godlike beings, but I connect with people. And even though they might have these godlike powers, they are also people. And so I want to find that element of them and I find that's what makes them interesting as characters.

So if you're using an ad style for that as well, because it really does harken back to very post-war adverts and merchandising. It’s very Mad Men. Do you think that influences how your books sell?

Yes, but I think in a positive way.

Oh, I don't mean it in a negative way, by any means!

No, because it could go either way. I feel like if I had done this style if I was around and kicking in the industry in the nineties, it would not have flown over. But we're in an era now where I think readers are more open to seeing new things. I think for a long time, superhero comics – there were definitely outliers – but a lot of it was trying to make a house style and everything was kind of in that same world because back then also a lot of stories crossed over. To read a Batman story, you had to buy all eight titles.

Not very self-contained for a while there.

Exactly. But now I think fans are more open to seeing completely different types of art. And I think the reason ours – me and Tom's – books have been successful on the art front is I feel like I'm delivering something new with each book.

Sure. Yeah. You do switch it up quite a bit actually.

I do. It's so funny because I will come up with this whole plan of how I'm going to do this book. I always try to come up with a new strategy for each book. And so I'll do that and I'll spend all this time, tell my wife about it and go, oh, I'm going to make it, I'm going to do this whole new thing. It's going to be really cool. And then she'll look at it and she'll be like, “looks like all your other stuff”. [laughs]

Oh no! [laughs]

I mean, she probably likes my other stuff, but she never sees the little things I obsess over.

You started out with things like Punisher and Sheriff of Babylon and these military comics for Image, and that's kind of a shift from what you're doing now. Which one are you more comfortable with, or is it a non-equivalent?

I think it's all just different parts of my life. When I was doing The Activity at Image, which led to The Punisher, and we kind of just took that real world military special operations kind of stuff and applied it to Punisher. And those were in such early days of my Big Two career that I was through all 16 issues of Activity and 20 issues of Punisher, I really think I was trying to find myself in there.

Those are some really tight pages though.

They're all right. Especially if you look at The Activity, the first trade especially one through six, I feel like you could almost see a different artist in each issue. Because I was wearing my influences on my sleeve, and so I was trying to be Stuart Immonen. I was trying to be Yanick Paquette. I was trying to be all these people I was into. But yeah, it was at this time where I was, and I still am very much into fiction and non-fiction in that military world, something that interests me. But there was a time towards the end of Punisher where I'm like, maybe this is just going to be my thing. Instead of trying to veer away from it, I'll make it my thing.

And that's kind of how Sheriff of Babylon came about because I was in that space and working with Tom, and then it was just kind of a matter of Tom got the Batman gig while we were on Sheriff. And so I had this new opportunity to go places that I wanted to for so long. And then when I was given that opportunity, it was great. And I mean, not to say I would never do a military thing again, but the stuff we're doing now interests me so much more.

With your style in mind, but also your history with these military comics and the way that you handle war and fighting and the comics that you're working on now, how do you go about harnessing that mid-century visual language of propaganda without making it propaganda?

I mean, especially on Punisher. Punisher fans are crazy, let's just say that. I have no problem admitting that. He's actually not a favorite character of mine. I was very into the idea of bringing out the military side of him more when we got the gig, but I like when he showed up in other books, but just not an aggro guy. I like my Luke Skywalkers. But I always, even in The Activity and Punisher – which are very much kind of action movie versions of the military – I wanted violence to feel real. Especially when we got to Sheriff [of Babylon], I didn't want to shy away from it and pretend it wasn't there and all these things, but I also didn't want to glorify it. I didn't want to make it a horror movie. I wanted things to feel like, when you get shot, it's horrible. Or at least I imagine it’s horrible. [laughs]

Just taking a guess.

Yeah. But it does happen in those worlds. And so I wanted to make sure that was portrayed that way rather than a “oorah! Look how great this is” kind of way.

Do you have to consciously think about this stuff? Does it weigh on your head when you're trying to figure out how these images should look?

I'm very hoity toity about my art. Everything is thought out. There's a reason for things – there's multiple reasons for things. I get into a lot of the psychology of how I lay up my panels and facial expressions and body language and all that stuff.

So all of those details of 'how this page works' and 'how does this story parse', and 'will people get the irony of it'? Man, that seems like a lot to have to think about all at once on top of doing the actual art itself..

But it's also the thing I love about it. Like I said, I'm hoity toity about an art that I always view my art as my legacy. So everything I do, I want to mean something at least to me. And hopefully the readers.

Well it shows. And maybe it’s just a hunch, but it’s paying off for you, I think.

I think it is, too.

For more with Mitch Gerads, visit our interviews with him and Tom King about Riddler: One Bad Day.