Minnesota native, CHRIS ANDERSON had the kind of early support that many comic creatives would love to have shared. He’s made his mark as a comic artist as well as a serious storyboard artist now residing in L.A.
BTP: Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decided to pursue your career as a creative storyteller.
ANDERSON: I grew up in Minnesota with much older brothers who had comics from the early '70s in a box in the basement along with their Playboys. For some reason I was drawn to this box quite frequently. My dad was the perfect age to be among the first comics readers. He was 11 in 1939 and always talked about having the first Superman. He loved the Shadow and the Spirit, Captain Marvel. I was always drawing but with no focus, until the late 80s Burton Batman fever hit and then I started buying and drawing my own comics. I was 12 or 13 when I discovered the Marvel superstars that would go on to found Image Comics. Especially Liefeld. I mean, that Levis 501 commercial legitimized comics to the rest of the world in my little eyes. So my dad got me Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and that began a life of commitment, deep down in my bones, to telling stories with my art.
BTP: Your Dad with the deep cuts. That’s so cool. What I find interesting about your work is that it seems to inhabit a world all of your own creation. Like, I don’t see the direct lineage from those classic comics. When and where did your voice take hold and how did you know to trust it?
ANDERSON: Well, if you look at my early work, it was very 90s influenced. But that was the 90s. But as it evolved, I really got into the work of Burton as an illustrator, Ralph Steadman, Egon Schiele and other artists who pushed the figure or evoked more of an emotion than adhered to anything else. But I think style is a journey. if you’re drawing enough, you’ll make mistakes or I should say, discover things you hadn’t intended that looks interesting. If you pay attention to that and incorporate it into your work as you go forward, it becomes your style. You have to embrace the unexpected and then harness it. I like to paraphrase Thelonious Monk: “It’s not a mistake if you do it twice.”
There was a period of about 10 years, where I didn’t read comics or draw a whole lot. I honestly think that it was a good thing because when I came back to it, I didn’t have the bad habits or follow the trends of the late 90s thru the 2000s and I think a lot if not most artists now, pull from that era. So I had a time where I was just able to discover my style without influence. I will say that I do still look at other artists and try to evoke their magic. But I find that is when I get artist’s block and imposter syndrome. The second I let go and tell myself to just trust myself and draw the way I draw, the clouds part. But I have to actually remind myself once in a while. That took time to figure out.
BTP: Who was your first advocate or earliest mentor that helped in your pursuits?
ANDERSON: Well, My Dad was the first. He would point out how insane the art of the 90s was and basically unreadable. I thought he was nuts then. But he was also right. It took me a minute, but clarity over substance became a hard mantra for me.
BTP: That’s very astute. I think a lot of artists had a hard hurdle to get over during the early 90s in that regard. What do you think the hardest thing was for you to develop as you grew into your career? Are there moments when you thought you might give up or do something completely different?
ANDERSON: Well, I sort of did give up for a while. The biggest hurdle was figuring out what I wanted my career to even be. I felt like a dog chasing its tail, seeing a squirrel, smelling food all at once to where I kind of laid down and slept until luck and serendipity guided the way. Eventually, when the time was right, it did. Now I’m playing a bit of catch up, but I wouldn’t have been ready if I had found success at any other time.
BTP: When you originally set out to study and learn, when did your learning take place and what resources did you have available to you?
ANDERSON: I was in a bubble for years. I didn't have anybody who was interested in the same things I was. So it was all from books and just in my own head until I started to go to Drink & Draw in Los Angeles where I took advantage of the fact that I could put my work in front of Dave Johnson, Dan Panosian and Jeff Johnson every week and let them tear me apart and build me back up. Those were the most important couple of years of my growth, I think that mentorship is something that's severely missing in comics today.
BTP: That’s a great group of guys there. So up until that point, you were ronin. Had you been to conventions showing your work to editors or mailing anything in? How did you end up getting your first break in comics and/or storyboards?
ANDERSON: I did start going to conventions at some point. I got my work in front of DC and Marvel when they had open submissions at SDCC and made the cut every time. They always liked the work, had a few criticisms, but I never heard back when I would follow up. So I eventually decided that just paving my own way was the right course of action for me. Nothing like proving yourself on the football field to make the cheerleader pay attention to you. I did my indie comics for a few years and then Tim Seeley called me to do a story in CREEPSHOW which led to me being able to do work in Heavy Metal and once people saw that, I started getting emails for more work.
Now, storyboards, on the other hand, are a different animal altogether. You need to know a working director or producer who needs them and then they need to tell their friends and so on. It’s all about who you know. I honestly still have no idea how to actively get more work other than that. When I was a teacher, a parent of one of my students was a producer on an AT&T commercial and that’s how I started. I got my work on the Penguin because a friend who was a PA on Sabrina the Teenage Witch (My best friend and music partner from high school played Harvey on the show) called me out of the blue after not being in contact for 20 years and said he needed me. So, it’s just about being around and getting your work out there.
BTP: When compared to your early work experience do you feel like you were well-educated to step into a role or was there a larger divide between school and actual pipeline production?
ANDERSON: Haha! No way. DID I feel I was? For sure. But I think everyone looks back after they've grown and shakes their head at the naivete they had when they were younger. I moved to LA when I was 19 and started an animation company. I got out after a year because I hated the pipeline. In fact, I pursued music and became a teacher for 18 years before getting back into storytelling because it put such a bad taste in my mouth. I think as a young artist, you chase the high of initial ideas and then when the "boring work" of getting through the other parts sets in, you lose interest. My ADHD probably didn't help.
BTP: Whoa...wait a sec... let’s unpack this. How did you have the wherewithal to start an animation company let alone animate? And where did the gift of music come into play that you’d spend 18 years of your life teaching it?
ANDERSON: A guy in my apartment building was a freelance animator and so I would spend some time hanging with him. He did mostly 3D work and at the time, it could take a whole day to render a minute of animation on a home computer. So I would storyboard things and just dove in drawing cels. Pretty quickly, along with another 2D animator, a colorist and a producer, we had a little company.
Music was just something I picked up in between drawing as a teen and eventually taught myself a lot of different instruments, wrote songs, recorded a few albums for myself and others, played a LOT of shows. Teaching was different. I actually taught general education elementary school and then pre-school. I always incorporated music into the lessons. Nobody seemed to care that I didn’t have a degree. Ha!
BTP: What do you feel was missing in your education vs. the reality of the job? How would you fix this?
ANDERSON: Well, I only went to school for a year, but I don't think three more would have changed much from what I've heard. I do wish people would talk more about the business aspects of being a creative. From what I hear, they don't really help you with that in art school either.
BTP: No, they do not. And when I figured that out, I read the only book I could find, and it was for fine artists. Still, you had an innate ability to learn and to teach it seems. How did you go about teaching yourself enough to make a career out of storytelling? What was the transition like going from teaching music to working with directors?
ANDERSON: If you want it bad enough, you figure it out. You can’t be afraid to stumble along the way. When you do, and you will, you learn not to do that again or to tweak it. If you teach people that, the rest is easy. For storytelling, you pay attention to what works AND what doesn’t work. So you see other people stumble, you learn from that as well. I’m a thought process junkie when it comes to storytelling so I’m always asking creators what “rules” they abide by when laying out a page or directing a scene. So that’s always in the back of my head when I work. But you have to come to your own conclusions too. Otherwise you’re just being a parrot. Which is fine. But I don't want to be a parrot. I want to do things differently. But you have to first understand all the elements of storytelling that you can before you veer off. You have to justify your storytelling choices. That’s a key part of the relationship between a teacher and a student. Communicating and justifying your choices. That’s also a key part of the relationship with what I do and directors. When we meet and I have the shot list, I go over each part and try to draw out of them why they made the choices they did. That helps me to understand the project as a whole. We both want to make the best thing we can so getting a grasp on the choices they’re making and the motivations make it easier for me to crawl into my cave and draw their vision which in turn communicates to the crew or executives and they are left with very few questions if any.
BTP: As creatives we tend to have personal goals or aspirations for ourselves. What are yours and what does achieving that look like in the next 5 to 10 years?
ANDERSON: I'm a member of the Art Director's Guild which was a goal of mine for quite a while. It’s a key that unlocks bigger jobs in TV and film. I've worked on a million commercials, music videos and shows like Insecure and the Penguin. I'd love to do more tv and film. They're longer jobs and take time away from doing comics, but they pay well and can afford me the time to work on my own comics that I'd like to bring into the world.
BTP: That’s fantastic. Can you talk more about the challenges you face in keeping a steady flow of work coming in? And what was your journey into getting that much coveted and hard to attain ART DIRECTOR’S GUILD admittance?
ANDERSON: Oh, the workflow is always a challenge. But I have no problem reaching out to people and introducing myself if I think there is potential for future work. You have to do that to survive. I got the ADG membership on the Penguin. It’s a bit of a Catch 22 to be admitted. You have to do 500 hrs on a union show, but you can’t work on a union show without being a member. So you have to get work on a show that becomes union after you are already on it OR, like in my case, the show takes a bit of a fine, but they ask the guild if you can get a waiver and be put on a union timecard. It was this whole thing where I had already worked like 300 hours before we figured that out so at the end, they needed to find some things for me to do to hit the mark. I ended up doing some concept art as well to make up the time.
BTP: What are your biggest fears in your career currently and what are you doing to keep those in check?
ANDERSON: Sometimes I take on too much just to make ends meet. I've been both lucky and tenacious about getting work. I don't want to burn completely out. So I try to work out deals that give me passive income if the project is successful. I think I'm getting more recognition and with that, hopefully a higher rate will be justified in the eyes of clients so I don't have to take on so much at once. My BIGGEST fear is that work will dry up. AI doesn't do anything to make MY life easier.
BTP: I’m with you there. I’ve been hearing horror stories about storyboard folk being hired to CORRECT AI boards, and their workload dropping off some. What are the hardest things about juggling a career, passive income, and comics? If you could only do one thing and make a living at it what would that be and what would you produce?
ANDERSON: I won’t lie. It’s all hard. It’s stressful. Sometimes I miss having a regular paycheck that I know will be coming in. But on the other hand, It’s a different stress than working a job you don’t like and feeling like a cog. If I could do one thing, it would be to make my own stories and draw my own comics without the weight of also having to do the hustle. I think that is a reality I can manifest. I mean, Three-Headed-Pig-Man is going to be the next Ninja Turtles. Mark my words. Ha!
BTP: Describe the perfect day for yourself. Comparatively, what would be the perfect workday?
ANDERSON: That's a tough one. I'm so mercurial. But it would be hanging out with family and friends while I get to draw and not think of the stresses of day-to-day life. My perfect workday would be the exact same.
BTP: Funny, that would probably be my answer as well. As long as I can get a hit of each of those things and get a satisfactory amount of work done, boy, that sounds swell.
BTP: What advice would you give to your younger self regarding your life’s path thus far?
ANDERSON: Trust your instincts. You don't need a "day job" to survive. In fact, your creativity is worth more to people than anything else you'll ever do. You'll be ok.
BTP: Excellent. So many young people doubt themselves because their lens is either so narrow or their world experience so small. For me, talking with seasoned pros helped out immensely to put things into perspective. Do you currently have a community of professional creatives or storytellers that you see on a regular basis?
ANDERSON: I do. And it’s growing. With my YouTube channel, creators that I interview are always coming into the fold and I stay in touch. We’re all going through similar things so it’s good to have a shoulder to lean on.
BTP: What is the most difficult thing you’ve had to do in your career and how did you make it through?
ANDERSON: My first storyboard job, about 15 years ago, I accepted without knowing anything about how to storyboard. Storyboarding and comics are not the same. Different language altogether. So I, did a google search, rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Fake it till you make it. But it's best to make it on the first try.
BTP: HOLY CATS! That gets some bravery points. I could have never done that. Good on you though, and look where rolling those dice got you!
Thanks again for joining us, Chris. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
ANDERSON: I’m everywhere. I have a website, Patreon, YouTube channel, BlueSky, Instagram, Newsletter (I encourage you to sign up. I’m not annoying, I promise).
All the Links: https://linktr.ee/Cduck77