By Matt McGloin • 5/11/09

Declaration Of Independents: Rick Ross

Rick Ross is the definition of an Independent creator. He began drawing at an early age and at nine years old won his first art competition. By the time he was fourteen, Rick had already been published in the newspaper and had completed his first animated film.

Besides being an artist, Ross is a writer and filmmaker, but his pencils have popped up in Urban Monsters from Image/Shadowline among his comic book credentials.

Rick Ross, has put together a very unique looking online comic book magazine site, Agitainment.Comics. Updated weekly, Agitainment.Comics features his own original stories and soon will publish up and coming creators.

Up at Agitainment.Comics by Rick Ross right now are The Gryphon, his first published work. The Collector, a short story about a comic book collector’s grandson trying to get rid of his grandfather’s collection -- to other collectors -- with a surprising twist.

The third web comic and the one currently being updated every Monday is U.F.O. A great tale about goofy farmers, aliens and ruskies.

Rick was kind enough to speak with CosmicBookNews’ Matt McGloin about his creative beginnings and inspirations, Agitainment.Comics, and he also gives a little advice for aspiring creators.

CosmicBookNews: What can you tell us about Agitainment.Comics? What was the reason for starting it?

Rick Ross: Agitainment.Comics (agitainment.com/ics) began humbly, as nothing more than an online portfolio. Last year, as I was talking with a number of comics editors about jobs, I realized my then current online portfolio needed a little more pizzazz. So I began to redesign it, resulting in pretty much what you see now in the Gallery section of Agitainment.Comics.

When no jobs materialized right away, I decided to put together a short comic of new work to show the various editors. So I sat down and wrote a story that became The Collector. Over the course of the next few weeks, as I drew and inked the pages, it occurred to me that drawing a page a week was a reasonable commitment, even with other deadlines. And it hit me that an online comic magazine was well within my means to publish, both in terms of time and money.

So on top of my portfolio I added a whole new site that would display online content like a magazine. And since I was inspired for the story of The Collector by old EC Comics, I thought it would be great if the site itself looked like an old comic book. Months of fevered programming later, Agitainment.Comics was born.

Currently, Agitainment.Comics features work by me, but our next story, Iron Harvest is written by a different writer. As the site gains more traction, the plan is to expand it into showing work by any number of different up-and-coming artists.

CosmicBookNews: You began to draw at an early age, what inspired you to draw? A favorite book or cartoon?

Rick Ross: I can't say, honestly what started me drawing. I know that I loved it as far back as I can remember. In grade school, while other kids were busy working on their assignments in class, I was busy drawing on mine. I used to get in so much trouble for it with my teachers, to the point my parents had to get involved. To their credit they supported me against the school, even providing drawing paper for my entire class one year!

As far as inspirational books or cartoons goes, there are just too many to list. Limited to comics, though, I'd say the Jim Starlin runs on Captain Marvel and Warlock in the early 70's were always my favorite.

CosmicBookNews: When did your interest in comic books begin?

Rick Ross: When I was five, I remember getting a couple of comics during a family vacation, the kind they used to sell three to a bag. I think my parents just wanted something to shut me up, and it worked. The comics were Tomb of Dracula, Kid Colt, and Marvel Two-in-One --you know, the biggies. Even though the art and stories weren't always the best, there was something about the medium that just immediately grabbed me.

Pretty soon I was reading whatever I could get my hands on, borrowing them from my friends, trading things for them. My parents weren't big on buying me a lot of stuff when I was a kid, so I ended up drawing my own comics. I have a shoe box full of comics I made for myself where I would swipe the costume from some character (say the Flash), change it a little (I altered the wings on his head), then give him a different name. Since, as a kid, you don't always understand the meanings and connotations of certain words, a few of my characters are somewhat embarrassingly named. Like the pulse- pounding Jaywalker! Now there's a super power to be proud of. But probably the worst name was The Over-Comer--thankfully his power had nothing to do with the implied sexual fetish.

CosmicBookNews: [Laughs]

How different is writing/drawing a comic book compared to say, doing an animated film?

Rick Ross: Very. My experience doing animation was always in traditional character animation, which is a long and time-intensive process. Most of the time you have no sense you're even telling a story. It's much more about acting on paper, being focused on one tiny moment. Once you get a few pages done, maybe you can start to feel an emotional beat, but to me it's not really storytelling.

With comics you can compress time in your drawings, so that what might take you a week of work to get across in animated form, you can draw in a few minutes in comics. There's still acting involved-- trying to find the right pose to convey what a character is feeling-- but instead of having maybe a dozen or more main poses to a shot in animation (plus all the in-betweens), you've got just one in comics. Which makes the burden higher in a way: you want to find the perfect pose to tell the story, since there's no next pose to flesh it out.

CosmicBookNews: You have published work under Image/Shadowline,Urban Monsters. How did that come about?

Rick Ross: Long story short, I met a couple of guys at Comic-Con who were starting up a studio and looking for artists. They liked my work but didn't have any projects for me at the time. Months later, when I contacted them to follow up, they told me they had this project set up but were running into scheduling problems with the art. So I jumped on board and penciled 5 pages over the first weekend and just kept going from there. In all, I penciled 58 pages in about two and a half months, and never missed a deadline, all while holding down another full-time job! I'm really proud of that.

CosmicBookNews: You currently have a web comic that you update with a new page every Monday, U.F.O. It seems to have a great mix of flying saucers, aliens and paranoid farmers. Can you go into detail what it is about and where you got the idea?

Rick Ross: It actually began life as a pitch to Ape Entertainment for an anthology they're putting out later this year about UFO's. The editor there asked if I'd like to submit and I said yes. I immediately contacted my friend Gus Higuera, the uber-talented writer of New World Order for Image Shadowline and Re-Evolution for DC's Zuda, who has a real interest in UFO's and the paranormal. I thought we'd make a good team, and I'm sure we would have if his schedule had allowed. After we pitched a few ideas back and forth, Gus was forced to drop out, so I took up the basic ideas, twisted and expanded them, and out came the U.F.O. story as it is today.

U.F.O. is basically an homage to classic Red Scare sci-fi, particularly the EC comics of the period, the Mars Attacks trading cards, and of course great old movies like War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still (the 50's versions of each). Inspired by these, I wanted to play with all the old cliches: rural farmers, alien invaders, military investigators, abductions, ray guns, flying saucers, and so on. It's part homage, part spoof, part serious, and I hope, a whole lot of fun. It's certainly been lots of fun to create!

CosmicBookNews: U.F.O. is both written and illustrated by you. Do you write the story first or do it "on the fly" as you draw?

Rick Ross: I'm very meticulous about writing. I usually go through four or five drafts of a story before it ever sees the art board. I will rewrite, though, as I'm drawing, usually to flesh out or alter beats here and there. However, a couple of pages of U.F.O. came to me during the drawing process, which explains why it was originally supposed to be a 16 or 17 page story, but ended up 22. In addition, I always polish the dialogue at the very end, after the art is finished, when I'm doing the lettering, just to make sure I explain any plot point I might not have emphasized sufficiently in the art or to remove any redundancy between words and pictures.

CosmicBookNews: What comes easier for you, the writing or the drawing? Do you prefer one over the other?

Rick Ross: Drawing is by far much easier for me. Always has been. I've been an artist since I can remember, but I only really started trying to tell stories in the last few years. That probably explains why it takes me four or five drafts before I'm happy with a story.

CosmicBookNews: What can you tell us about working on a "hard copy" comic book, like Urban Monsters compared to a digital only version?

In terms of format and detail, it's pretty much the same since I plan on publishing most everything I put on the web. So I work at the same page dimensions using the same media. The only real difference for me is the ultimate presentation. The loss of detail you get on the web is something you have to put up with, but it has its own charm, invoking the way comics were printed in the good old days before all the advances in printing over the last 20 years. The biggest difference for me in the current story is the lettering. While the font I'm using works fine on a monitor, I'll have to change it to something a little more subtle for the print version.

CosmicBookNews: Do you think more and more comics are going to go the digital route?

Rick Ross: Absolutely. It's too good a medium of delivery not to, both in terms of expense and limitless possibilities of distribution. It's also freeing in terms of format. Although I still follow a print model for the way I create comics, you can make the dimensions of a web comic arbitrarily large or strangely shaped, or variable, all things that are difficult if not impossible to do in print. And the length can be whatever you want, not just 22 pages or 64 pages or some other pre- prescribed print length set by your publisher or print house.

CosmicBookNews: Care to give any up and coming creators/self-publishers a few words of advice?

Rick Ross: It's funny you ask. I've actually just started writing a regular column on how to draw comics, which runs every Wednesday on Agitainment.Comics. In conjunction with that, I've been collecting resources for comic artists in the Agitainment Forum at agitainment.com/ics/forum/forum/ricks-soapbox. Come by, check it out and add to the list.

I guess the bottom line for becoming a comic creator/publisher is simply to do it. For little to no start-up cost you can have an online comic going in no time and get your work out there, gain an audience, get feedback, and most importantly, get better at what you do. In the past you had to live in New York to work in comics, but now virtually anyone can do it from anywhere. It's just a matter of deciding to do it then making the commitment to put up at least one page a week (more if you're really ambitious). After a few weeks, you'll start to see yourself getting better. And if you're an unknown creator trying to get your big break in the industry, there's no better way to promote yourself than to have a great webcomic that updates regularly. It shows your talent and demonstrates your professionalism at hitting deadlines.

CosmicBookNews: What's next for Rick Ross and Agitainment?

Rick Ross: U.F.O. will be finishing up in May, and we're already starting the process of looking to publish it in traditional form as a one-shot comic (you'll finally be able to see all the detail in the art that you're missing on the computer screen). Check the Agitainment Bulletins section of Agitainment.Comics for announcements as this nears realization.

As I mentioned above, Iron Harvest will be the next story up on Agitainment.Comics starting May 25th. It's written by Dan Hill, an up- and-coming young comics writer from Britain, and drawn by me. Dan's a really brainy guy, so Iron Harvest is a lot richer conceptually than U.F.O., which will be a fun change of pace I think. And since the setting for the story is more contemporary, I'm also getting to go in a different direction with the art, using a lot of Illustrator and Photoshop to enhance my standard ink work.

After that, I've got a sword-and-sorcery story I've written that will be next on the drawing board, and I'm also developing a couple of stories with novelist Adrianne Ambrose, which has been really fun.

So much good stuff to come, I wish I could update Agitainment.Comics every day!

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