This week, ComicsAlliance's War Rocket Ajax podcast is happy to welcome David Marquez to the show! He's the up-and-coming artist of Fantastic Four: Season One and Ultimate Spider-Man, and he'll tell us what it was like to get two high profile projects to kickstart his job at Marvel. And you can listen to the whole show right here!War Rocket Ajax #104: Loud and Handcuffed with David Marquez

(WARNING: Contains NSFW language)

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On this week's show, Chris takes a trip to the Flea Market and comes home with a pretty amazing T-Shirt, Matt has finished Mass Effect 3, and we both engage in some wild speculation about the nature of the Mushroom Kingdom.

When David joins us, we talk about the long road to overnight success:



"The summer of '05 was my first San Diego experience, and it was a blast. It encouraged me to put together a portfolio, and so I started actively pursuing breaking into comics. I had toyed with a couple of smaller conventions when I was in college and brought my portfolio and had my ass handed to me, and that happens to everybody when they first go unless you're, I don't know, someone amazing. Which I was not.

So starting in '05, I started actively pursuing, and it took... Syndrome, the Archaia book, came out in 2010 and I started working on it the year before that, so it took a solid four years, almost five years, to see that pay off. But basically it was just going to conventions, doing portfolio samples. I met a guy and ended up drawing five issues worth of a graphic novel that never saw the light of day, but I chalk breaking in largely up to the improvement that allowed me to make. When you're drawing that much work, even if it's never published, you're getting a lot of bad pages out of your system. For that reason alone it was a good experience, even if the rest of it went a bit sour.

As far as the Archaia project specifically, I have to credit my girlfriend with this. In a lot of interviews, I've mentioned her because it played such an important role. About three and a half years ago, I was really frustrated and thought 'Maybe I should go back and teach, I'm not breaking in,' and she made the point that if the only effort I'm making is going to San Diego and trying to show my portfolio there, it's really easy to get drowned out at a huge show like that. And it's only once a year, what about the other 51 weeks a year when I'm not getting my work in front of people?

So I got active online, and one of the writers for Syndrome noticed me. He suggested me to Archaia and that ended up becoming Syndrome, which was a really cool experience."


That was in 2010. In February of 2012, he drew a Fantastic Four graphic novel that was on the best-seller list for three weeks. Find out more in this week's interview!


Show Notes:

Find Dave Marquez on Twitter, and at DavidMarquez.com!

Matt's Mass Effect 3 ending screen.

The Legend of Korra's premiere episode is still free on iTunes... FOR NOW!

So is the first bit of Ghost Trick!

Here's what Marquez's version of the Thing looks like, for those of you who haven't read Fantastic Four: Season One:

Chris's Rec: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Matt's Rec: The Legend of Korra

Comics Reviewed:

Avenging Spider-Man #6: "This thing is awesome. It does a really great job of bringing in where those characters are right now in their books, directly into this story. It all flows naturally. It's super-fun, it's action packed, it's Mark Waid and Greg Rucka. That's all I really need to say."

Hulk #50: "What I think is really great about this issue is that it brings together a lot of stuff from the Hulk series, but it also brings in events from when there was Hell on Earth in the Venom title and the Circle of Four story. Basically, the Red Hulk encountering demons has left some supernatural residue, so now he sees ghosts."

Suicide Squad #8: "Suicide Squad continues to be amazing. I'm not kidding: I am consistently amazed by this book, just not in any sort of good way... It's impossible to buy anything in this book as anything other than goofy as hell."

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