Mike Royer Quotes

I learned that, "Mike, you get your first job on your ability and every job after that on your dependability."

I'm finding that everything sells. I've been toying with the fact that I have this big giant glass jar with the metal screw lid on it that's full of ribbons and memorabilia from conventions and stuff. I've got buttons and I have all of my Walt Disney Mickey Mouse credit cards. I'm wondering in my old age if anyone would pay for a credit card with Mickey Mouse on it issued to me. I wonder if anyone would pay anything for that?

During the Mavelmania days in the late '60's I got a phone call one evening and I answered it and this voice said, "Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Word is you're a pretty good inker." That's how it started.

I moonlighted during a two-week vacation, doing a month's worth of work in two weeks; it almost killed me, but I wanted to stretch my muscles and the letter from the producer says, "Your storyboarding is Eisensteinian," referring to the famous Russian filmmaker.

I went to art school for about a year. I was born and raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon into a middle-class family who didn't have the funds to say, "Here, kid. Here's your money for school." So I worked real hard during the summer and saved money and was able to go to school for a year and borrowed a little money which I paid back after that first year.

I did a dozen superhero pinups. I signed them "Kirby/Royer" because it was Kirby's drawing. I didn't think I was committing some sort of sin.

If I wanted to own some Jack Kirby original art unless it was something that Giacoia or Sinnott had inked I was too close to it. I didn't want to collect his pages inked by me. Of course 40 years later I'd LOVE to have some of that stuff.

I learned early Jack Kirby favorite movies were the Warner Brothers from the '30s. When you look at Jack Kirby's comic books, or at least when I do, I can make an instant connection. When he said he loved those movies it was like, "Of course."

My most vivid memories of those times weren't the actual nuts and bolts, but just pleasant times sitting with Jack [Kirby] in his studio, going over the pages and looking out the window at my kids playing in his swimming pool .

I've been very lucky with the people I've met over the years. Way back in the early '70s I went to [Phil] Seuling's conventions for something like three years in a row from '70 to '72 and I remember at the '72 luncheon with the Academy of Comic Book Artists and talking with John Romita about the kind of brushes he used. Pros ask pros the same questions that fans do. "What kind of pens do you use? What kind of brushes do you use?" I was so amazed that the wonderful work John Romita was doing was accomplished with a Windsor-Newton series 7 Number 4. Not a 2 or a 3, but a 4.

I assisted with Russ [Manning] for about eleven months and my day job for 5 days a week was credit manager and paint salesman for Sherwin-Williams.

I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement.

If you ever go to talk to an editor you don't want to be able to turn down a job because you can't do what is necessary.

When I was at Disney and was a character art manager and handing out artwork that had to be inked we had a thing where if there was any lettering on it I'd hear, "I don't letter," and I said, "Look at it. It's drawing. Ink the drawing." I just learned from Mike Aarons how each letter was just part of the drawing.

I will say that I'm proud of my connection to DC comics because they are absolutely fabulous in sending reprint royalty checks.

People ask me who my favorite inker is and I tell them my favorite inker was Joe Sinnott...but I was the best. Now I don't mean that as any kind of egotistical thing. It's just that I did what Jack wanted.

I live in the past when it comes to movies, but my own career is a matter of remembering the nuts and bolts and things like eating chocolate cake and drinking milk with Jack [Kirby] in his kitchen, but that's all I remember.

There are different rules for comic books now. You've got prima donna's that are dealing with the direct sales market, so if they say it's going to be late, then that's what you tell the dealers and it's late.

I did get a nice compliment from Ramona Fradon a few years ago.She was talking about the one and only Plastic Man comic that I inked for her for DC and she said it was the only time that she'd ever had anyone ink her. Everyone else put in their own personality and changed it. In fact, bless her heart, she said if she were still doing Brenda Starr, she'd have me ink it.

I've met some real talents that were...real talents and I've met some real talents that were incredible people.People like Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, to a certain extent Jim Steranko, who is an institution all to himself. What a talent. What a genius talent.

I have my heroes. Some of whom are still alive, and unfortunately many that aren't.

It's not Comic Con any more. It's this huge marketplace for the motion picture and television industry. And the toy manufacturer's and the game people. One of the problems with International Comic Con is that tickets go on sale for the next year's event and the place is full of thousands and thousands of kids who have scraped together every dime to get admittance because they want to get all the freebies.

I found that the majority of people who stopped at my table [ at the Comic Con] last didn't even know who Winnie the Pooh was, and the new feature was just opening in the theaters.

It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.

I like to think that I gave Jack Warner Brothers inking and Joe Sinnott gave him MGM inking. If you're not as in love with old movies as I am you might not make that connection, but I can see that connection.

Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.

Forty percent of my ideas came from my wife.

It was months later when I was sitting at the board in my studio and my wife would stick her head in and say, "What if you did Pooh and...oh, we don't do that anymore." I do have my soapbox and will go to my grave being a Disney company man.

In most companies, the corporate mentality is if you're over 30, you're on the downhill side, and if you're over 40, you're brain dead. Or, if you're over 30 or 40 and you've been doing it for a while, you've got experience and you want to be paid for that experience.

I chose Bagdasarian Productions when I heard from some colleagues at work who were buying story boards at the time back in the early '90. I met the man once when I came in with the first half of the story board and the only thing he said when looking at the first half of the board was, "It's so nice to see someone using their imagination."

When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs.

I sometimes look at the careers of other... I guess I could call them contemporaries or maybe close artists; you know, the 4 or 5 guys who go to New York City and get a loft and work together and use each other as models and that sort of thing and wait for years and years to get married. Maybe I just wasn't that definite.

I remember on a Friday afternoon getting a phone call from Grant Simmons saying, "Mike," we got to be pretty good friends; "Mike, the Sheriff is closing us down on Monday. If you'd like to drive into the studio tomorrow morning, you can have anything you want." So rather than go in and take home piles and piles of cels of Spider-Man what did I take home? Two pages of original art that got sent out to the west coast. Now of course if I'd have taken all the rest of that stuff home I could probably have retired a lot earlier.

I guess I've been naive my entire life.

Being a naive 20-something I didn't think that I could just go to the screen cartoonist's union, that I was a member of, and scream bloody murder and they would have jumped all over this guy and said, "Oh, but yes he does get screen credit."

In fact, sometimes when I look at something my memory does work. I remember the panel where Alex Toth told me, "Mike, if you really don't understand all that, you don't need to put it on there."

I started out wanting to be a straight adventure cartoonist, but in 1979 realized what my real bag was.

Sometimes I look at some of my old work and I don't like it.

There are still people who don't like my work and that's okay with me.

I love pre-code movies. Some of my favorites are movies with Warren William and there is an MGM film called "Skyscraper Souls" which is the best Warner Brothers movie that MGM ever made.

I was with Roy Thomas on a panel and he turned to me and said, "You know, your name is on the cover a magazine every month." I said, "Really?" He pulled out a copy of "Destroyer," and said, "If you cover up the DEST you've got Royer on the cover every month."

I still have a lot my Disney store art left and if I ever run out I'll just redraw it, because it will still be my original art and as a freelancer I own it.

When you're paid $29 for something and 30 or 40 years later you're seeing it on eBay with pages going for $199 or more, it's like, "Dammit!"

I used to get letters from guys in prison. Anymore now I don't even open them. They'd ask me to please sign a couple of cards for their children. Then I see them on eBay two weeks later. Or the people that write and say, "You is one of my favorite cartoonists. I would like a drawing, please." I guess they encourage inmates to write letters to celebrities. It's like a way to make money by selling autographs or something. Give me a break.

Why are other people profiting off that? I can see that if I have the page and sold it for $50 and 20 years later somebody's got it for $200, okay. That's business. But I had no say in that art being out there. It just really burns me.

I know some stories about "liberation" and stuff that's been liberated by people who turn around and get on their soapbox about how it's unfair that the artists didn't benefit while they're sitting on stuff that they "liberated," but that's another story for another time.