Elephantmen Creator Richard Starkings on Pencils

Richard Starkings is not just the creator of the Elephantmen comics, he is also the owner. While many artists hand over the rights to their comics to the publisher – making them vulnerable to being overruled or pushed out altogether if sales begin to dip – Starkings has maintained control over his comics for over sixty issues. Image Comics, the publisher of Elephantmen, believes that their artists should have ownership of their creations.

Starkings earned a degree in English and Media studies from the Dorset Institute of Higher Education. He wrote Dr. Who fanzines, and was the Editor of Boys’ Adventure Titles for Marvel UK in the late 80s. He observed that working for a large corporate publisher is like churning out sliced bread in the sense that mainstream comics like Batman and Spiderman have to have a recognizable feel and consistent elements, which detracts from the thrill that readers derive from encountering fresh new characters and plot lines.

“Sharpening a pencil is like a cup of tea for your brain.” 

Eventually he followed a girl to California, where he started his own company called Comicraft. Comicraft offered digital lettering for comic books first as a service and then as a product. It grew from a two-man show consisting of Starkings and a part-time assistant to a company of sixteen employees in a Santa Monica office. He used the profits from Comicraft to fund his creations.

Despite being a forerunner in the digitization of comics, Starkings prefers to do his work by hand: “I don’t do any professional work with a pen, but I still use my hands. … While the computer has more tools, when I write Elephantmen I use a pencil and a sketchbook and I write dialogue by hand. There is something about the process of the mind to the hand, compared to the process of the mind to the computer – that doesn’t work for me.” According to Starkings, writing and drawing by hand exercises a different part of the brain than creating on a computer, and “Sharpening a pencil is like a cup of tea for your brain.”

In addition, his interdisciplinary background in media has influenced the way he creates: “I like to do a lot of close-ups on the eyes, because in comics – and in movies too – you’re constantly looking for the eyes of the characters.” He notes that there is a story in peoples’ eyes that readers and viewers are used to seeing. Starkings is  a conscientious creator in many ways, in fact. While working for Marvel UK, he had a policy that if he was editing a comic, he had to write one to gain an understanding of what that creative process would like. The result was that he wrote many different comics – including Ghostbusters, Transformers, and Action Force – and became an even stronger editor and creator.

The lessons aspiring comic creators can learn from Starkings are numerous: maintain ownership of your creations, write and draw by hand to feel more connected to the page, and focus on the eyes, to name a few. You can view free issues of his comics here.