Alex Ross Art Book

[Lane Frisch]

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Considered one of the greatest artists in the field of comic books, Alex Ross has created some of the most iconic images known to fans today. For nearly 30 years, he has revitalized classic superheroes into works of fine art by illustrating characters including Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, Storm from the X-Men, the Avengers, Black Panther and many more.

In addition to highlighting original art from his most recent book, Marvelocity, visitors will also learn about how Alex Ross developed into a great illustrator through his childhood drawings, preliminary sketches, paintings and 3-dimensional head busts of characters in the Marvel Universe. Hear first-hand from Alex Ross about the making of Marvelocity in an exclusive video interview.

Alex Ross is a seasoned Humanitarian and Development worker who has been working in the sector for over twenty years. She has lived in 15 countries, across all continents and has worked for a variety of Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), with local, national, regional and global responsibilities. She is a child psychologist by training, starting out in the field of child protection and increasingly in operational and management positions.

He is also a member of the Chief Executive Officer & Board of Directors Practice where he works on placements at the chief executive officer and non-executive director level. In addition, Alex is a member of the Human Resources Practice where he leads searches for functional leadership in corporate security and HSE. His professional work is almost entirely cross-border.

Prior to joining Heidrick & Struggles, Alex was a client partner at a multinational recruitment firm in their Industrial Markets Practice, where he worked broadly in the infrastructure, transportation and support services sectors.

Previously, Alex was a principal for an international executive search firm, a consultant at an online executive recruiting and talent acquisition firm, and a manager at an international recruitment company.

As you may have already read, this past Monday marked the 10th anniversary of creation of Comic Book Resources. That 10th anniversary is a shared one, happily, with the acclaimed DC Comics mini-series "Kingdom Come" by Alex Ross and Mark Waid. In short, when "Kingdom Come" #1 came out, I decided I wanted to be part of the excitement. So, I set up a lil' Kingdom Come fan site, threw up some message boards and a comics community broke out faster than you can say "Shazam." When the series finished, I was left with a fantastic community that I had no idea what to do with. Then the idea struck me to build a new site to serve that community. That site was CBR.

Today, I present to you a lengthy interview with series creator and artist Alex Ross and together we take a look back on a series that launched Ross to super-stardom and helped inspire the creation of Comic Book Resources. This interview was conducted on May 2nd, 2006.

"Kingdom Come" #1 Alex, thanks for talking with me today. Monday, May 8th marked the 10th Anniversary of the publication of "Kingdom Come." Let's start out with the most obvious question and the one everyone is probably asking you over and over again these days: it's been ten years since "Kingdom Come" #1 was released - what do you think of it now? And of course nobody has asked me this question, just so you know. [laughs]

Well, what about the "Absolute Kingdom Come" edition? That's celebrating the anniversary, isn't it? Yeah, which I had to push for! [laughs] It's not that it was a major thing, it's just that it wasn't necessarily on anyone's schedule until I was saying, "Well, c'mon, it's the 10th anniversary and you guys do these Absolute things." I was asking when the Absolute's were still just Wildstorm product, but when they started to do "Avengers/JLA" and other books, I started asking again.

That format is something I've had my eyes on because, obviously, I like the big stuff. I thought, "Well, you know Kingdom Come will sell some copies, so let's push for that." Outside of that, there's really nothing else that is occurring that's celebrating this wonderful 10th anniversary that I think pretty much nobody is aware of except maybe a few.

Well, you know, the 10th Anniversary has some pretty significant meaning for myself and CBR. "Kingdom Come" pretty much began Comic Book Resources. Prior to the publication of "Kingdom Come" I had put together a comics web page with a collection of comic links and some scans here and there, but I never really did anything with it. Once I started reading about "Kingdom Come," I was blown away and it inspired me to set-up a Kingdom Come fan site. I updated the site throughout the series with news bits here and there, but the big thing about that Web site was it allowed me to play with some emerging Web tech, specifically message board software. I set-up a message board for each book of the series. Now, this came at a time when comics communities were pretty much non-existent outside of AOL and Compuserve. But by the second issue, the message boards were getting something like 2000 posts a month, which was a pretty significant number considering this was 1996 and the online comics community really hadn't taken off yet. Once the series ended, I had to do something with that very loyal community I'd built up, so I pulled together those links pages, added a few features and put together a whole bunch of message boards and named it all "Jonah Weiland's Comic Book Resources." (I thankfully excised my name from the title about a year later.) So, I guess you could say the release of "Kingdom Come" was a pretty significant moment in my life. Wow, that's very cool. It's somewhat sad for me to say this, but I didn't have any knowledge of that simply because I only just married into a computer in recent years, so I've had very little computer exposure through pretty much the entire '90s. It's only been in the last few years I'm aware of certain things on the Internet, but even then I don't go on any boards, so you could tell me there's a board talking about any particular project of mine and I wouldn't know it. Like, if there is such thing as a "Justice" board, I wouldn't know it. [laughs]

One of the things I found the other day was an old zip disc with the last incarnation of the Kingdom Come Web site from 1997 and I've posted it online once again, but only for a short period for those who might care to take a look back in time a bit. That could be kind of fun for you to look at, a moment of history frozen in 1997, but remember it hasn't been updated in nine years.

OK, let's get back to the book itself and discuss some of the themes you explored in the book and how they resonate today. One of those themes was Superman growing rather disheartened over his world choosing to embrace much darker, less upstanding heroes of the day. Flash forward to today and we have characters violating each other's minds and heroes killing each other. With that in mind, could "Kingdom Come" as it was produced 10 years ago be made today? Yeah, except now it would seem redundant because all those same things are being explored in a lot of contemporary books. So, it would sort of be like why set it in the future if you can do it today? Yeah, you could write that "Kingdom Come" story now because they seem to be much more flexible or leaning towards that kind of overall "screw with our entire company" type of thing - characters live, characters die - but I think it benefited "Kingdom Come" to be a story out of time so that, in a way, through the trade paperback sales and the way it sinks into people, it's this moment in history that's not related to a specific time. You can read it today, you can read it ten years from now and it'll still be relevant. It's not connected to one version of a character that's no longer written.

I guess you could say in many ways "Kingdom Come" was rather prophetic. It was trying to be. You know, I was really disappointed at the time it was released simply because I wanted it to come out a full year before then. I got a little bit of a late start in '94 and only got to work on it by the fall of that year. I really wanted that thing out by the end of '95 because I thought it would still be catching a moment in time of the post-Image explosion where comics were selling like crazy and seemingly thousands of new characters had erupted on the scene from all the new upstart companies. What happened in '96 was the bubble had burst and it was becoming very clear that the system was falling. So, instead of it being prophetic of the future - which is what I had envisioned back in '93 when I started to write my first outline for it - it wound up really being more of a commentary upon the state of things as opposed to looking into the future and where things were going to go.

Yeah, yeah. Given the way it's been received over the years, I can't say that anything didn't really work out the way that I would have hoped. There's my dreams at that particular time, but what I wanted didn't really matter. "Kingdom Come" came out, basically, the way it needed to.

Now, wasn't Magog a character created as a response to all those characters that were popping up in the early '90s? Yeah. That's a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was - really only two key designs of Rob's - the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character - the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what's with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar -- I think that was his name -- well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

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