​Marvel Artist Skottie Young on His Origins, Animated Statues and More!

The Marvel Animated Statue line has been a long-running success for Gentle Giant Ltd., and that’s mostly due to the talented artist behind the line, Marvel’s Skottie Young. His cartoony takes on Marvel’s greatest heroes (and villains) inspire each piece in the line, and we sat down with him to talk about his career, baby super-heroes, Neil Gaiman, his favorite Marvel Animated Statues, and more!

DSTZach: I understand you were drawing at a young age. Did you go to school for art?

Young: I did not. I just drew all the time. Like most kids, I drew and played with toys and tried to draw my toys, I just didn’t stop drawing. It stuck with me.

DSTZach: What kinds of toys were you drawing?

Young: Transformers, obviously. I’m 43, so I’m right there in the pocket of all the best toys ever, right? Like He-Man toys, I tried to copy all of my He-Man figures. And MASK? Some younger whippersnappers may not remember MASK, but I thought they were pretty cool. He-Man and Transformers were my favorites.

DSTZach: How did you get your start at Marvel?

Young: I kinda backed myself into it. I met (writer/editor) CB Cebulski at a convention, and this was 21 years ago, so he was just coming back from Japan, where he was living and working, and he was setting up a studio at Image Comics and was looking for independent creators to do some pitches for Image books. So he and I became friends, and over the course of that first year he was writing and consulting at Marvel with some manga artists. He was at a bar one night with some editors, and one of them knew that he had some contacts with up-and-coming artists. He said he needed a fill-in artist on Iceman, and did CB know anybody who could turn it around real quick, and CB suggested me. I drew Iceman #3, and six months later CB got hired by Marvel as an editor. He put me on the Spider-Man: Legend of the Spider-Clan mini-series, and that blew up really fast, and I’ve been there ever since. So, 20 years later, here we are.

DSTZach: You even got an action figure out of that mini-series!

Young: I know, that was really cool!

DSTZach: How did the first idea for the Marvel Babies covers come about?

Young: I gotta give all that credit to George Beliard at Marvel. At the time he was project manager for special projects, meaning organizing all the variant covers, and all kinds of things like that. And I’d do variant covers from time to time. I had done some Little Marvel stuff, some Baby Marvel stuff for the badges at Heroes Con, and about three years prior, there was an actual X-Babies mini-series that got published that I did the covers for. It’s funny to show you how “right time, right place” works, because I did those five covers, and they didn’t really make a splash that much. Flash-forward three years later, and Midtown Comics in New York wanted an exclusive cover for their store, it was for Avengers vs. X-Men #1, so they asked me to do it, and I think George suggested to them, “Hey, you should have him do the X-Babies, like a throwback to the old X-Babies and stuff.” And they were like, “Aw, that’s cool!” So I just drew like 30-some characters on that cover and I didn’t really think anything of it, it was just like, “Oh, cool, okay, I like that, it’s fun.” It wasn’t my thing, it’s not like I had that weapon in my back pocket or anything. I was like, “That’ll be cool, that’ll be a fun challenge.” So I did it, and I think that cover ended up selling insane for them. I remember I could not stop seeing it on social media for almost a year, then they made a poster of it. And again, right time, right place, right after Avengers vs. X-Men was when Marvel Now happened, where all the creators who had been on long-time books – Bendis, Aaron, Fraction – everybody switched books and everybody got new titles. It was just perfect timing because there were going to be more number ones than Marvel’s ever done at one time, because they were basically rebooting everything. And they were like, “Hey, do you want to do the baby stuff, five covers?” and I was like “Whoa, five covers, that’s awesome!” And I’d do a couple and they’d be like “Do you want five more?” They would just keep adding and keep adding, and it just kept working, and I thought, “Oh, this will be a fun two or three-month gimmick. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna get tired of my little gags and jokes.” Because I just treated it like a comic strip, not necessarily “Look how cool I can draw!” I grew up reading the Sunday comics, so this was my chance to do The Far Side or Peanuts or whatever. But next year, in February or March, it’s gonna end up being ten years doing these covers. So again, it’s one of those accidental, “Oh, I did a thing, and then everybody really liked it, so we did it some more and now we’re still doing it.” I’ve had at least one cover due a week now for ten years, so it’s pretty wild.

DSTZach: Do you have a favorite character to draw?

Young: I really like drawing Cyclops, because I like to see how ridiculous I can make his giant visor. He­­­­’s always pretty fun. I like drawing Spider-Man because I like messing with his eye expressions, which on a big-head, little-body character just looks funny. It changes a lot. Deadpool is pretty fun, because you can always go pretty extreme with that character. I think they’re all pretty fun. The only one I don’t like drawing is Iron Man. Armor and things that need to look perfect plague me.

DSTZach: Which do you prefer, writing or illustrating? Or the ability to do both together?

Young: I love doing both together. It’s been a long time since I just did a job, where I had to take somebody else’s idea and illustrate it for them. I just don’t do that much anymore, I haven’t done that in years and years. So for me, drawing is writing as well. I feel like I’ve failed a cover if I just do an action pose. It’s like I couldn’t come up with an idea. But mostly I feel like drawing is writing even if I don’t put words in it, because I’m trying to tell some sort of a story even in that one image. It really depends. Drawing is really fun, but it takes much longer to get to your idea, to get to the finish. Writing is so fun right now, because it’s been a new challenge for me these last six or seven years. And it’s refreshed my love of collaboration. Being the artist, I was at the end of that collaboration line for so long. It stopped with me and my colorist. Being on the other side of it, it’ so exciting to hand in a script and see what Humberto Ramos brings back, or Jorge Carona or Aaron Conley, and your mind’s blown. So that part’s fun. I didn’t realize that was a part of the artistic process I’d been missing all these years, was to come up with an idea and see someone else’s interpretation of the idea and be like “That’s amazing!” So it’s a little bit of both, and it changes depending on the day, I think.

DSTZach: Did you ever think that you would be working on a project with Neil Gaiman?

Young: No, that was pretty awesome. My whole career is me saying stuff, “Hey, what about this?” and it just happens. My wife and I had just had our first kid, and I’d taken a couple of weeks off, and I’d sit there and rock my baby and do Q&As on Twitter, back when Twitter was manageable. Somebody asked what writers I hadn’t worked with that I wanted to work with. I’d just met Jason Aaron, and I said “Jason Aaron’s one of my favorite comic book writers, and he’d be cool to work with.” And then I said, “But Neil Gaiman’s my favorite novelist, it would be awesome to do something with him.” Enough of our fans started to replying back to us that it pinged up on his radar, and he DM’ed me and said “Your Wizard of Oz stuff is beautiful, and we should definitely do something together.” And I was like, “Whoa!” At the time he was getting married, so he was like “I’m a little busy right now, but if a project pops up I’ll keep you in mind.” We’d keep in touch here and there over the next year and a half, and then he reached out to me and said Harper Collins just bought his manuscript for “Unfortunately the Milk” and he wanted me to come on and illustrate it. He sent over the manuscript and it was fantastic, and I just went to town on it. And he was one of the best people to ever work with. I thought, “How am I gonna stack up against all these great artists he’s worked with, like Dave McKean and Chris Rydell?” And I thought he was gonna be like, “No, I don’t like this and I don’t like that.” But he didn’t ask for a single change the whole time. I just turned in every drawing and he would be like, “Beautiful, great, this is amazing, perfect.” The whole project. You can’t ask for something better than that. So that was pretty awesome.

DSTZach: Do you have a favorite Gentle Giant Marvel Animated-Style statue?

Young: It’s tough. I really like the Venom with the lollipop, that’s not my favorite, but it’s close. I love that one because when I drew that cover, when I turned it into George, I said “Gentle Giant is going to make this.” Then, when I was at San Diego, they had asked “What would you want to do for next year?” And I said, “Well, I think the Venom would be great, because you guys can turn the lollipop into an actual, translucent lollipop.” So they absolutely did it, and the next year they had one of the big prototypes there on the spinner. That was awesome to see. That was pretty cool, but I think Deadpool at the merc stand is the best. (Sculptor) Casen Barnard is so good. His ability to take my 2-D drawing and realize it and have it actually feel like I drew the rest is nuts to me. I don’t know how his brain works, but it’s like some sort of weird A.I. computer. Especially that one, because it’s such a straight-on drawing with no angle at all., and he realized the whole thing. That one’s pretty sharp, I love that one. The Vision, I think he nailed the facial expression. They’re all pretty perfect. I could just keep listing them. I think the Black Panther one is awesome too, on the ball of yarn.

DSTZach: Anything you want to plug?

Young: Humberto (Ramos) and I are still doing Strange Academy at Marvel. The Me You Love in the Dark is still coming out from Image, issue 2 just came out, that’s a five-issue limited series with Jorge Carona. And everyone can run over to my site (skottieyoung.com) and sign up for my newsletter, I’m gonna be launching some comic books through that soon, as well.