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This week we celebrate the great Kyle Baker for Comics Illustrator of the Week! Baker contributed the variant cover to this week’s Bizarro Comics #1. I first saw Kyle Baker’s work gracing the covers of Web of Spider-Man and Marvel Age when I was a kid. The first full interior work I saw by him was DC’s excellent Mature Reader’s version of The Shadow with writer Andy Helfer.

After working as an intern for Marvel Comics during his senior year of high school and then working on art assists for a period of time, Baker started to pick up penciling & inking assignments for The Big 2, including drawing the Howard the Duck movie adaptation for Marvel. Not being satisfied with just doing work that others wanted him to do or drawing in the style that was considered popular & marketable for the time, Baker decided to write & draw his own comics. This led to the publication of The Cowboy Wally Show graphic novel. Although, it was a low-printed indy book, it was enough to get the attention of editors looking for new original voices. So, 2 years later DC Comics published Baker’s next original comic Why I Hate Saturn, which would go on to win an Eisner Award and help solidify Kyle Baker as a creative force in the industry.

During the 1990’s Baker began to branch out, contributing regular comic strips for major magazines & newspapers, as well as work on animation projects, including an animated music-video with KRS-One in 1994.

Kyle Baker, to this day, continues to be a diverse artist, working on films, games, music, comics, illustration, etc. You can see what he’s been working on, including animation storyboards and preview comics pages on his Quality Jollity website here.

Other notable works by Kyle Baker: Nat Turner, Plastic Man, Instant Piano, Deadpool MAX, Justice INC, King David, You Are Here, Special Forces, and Truth: Red, White & Black.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

Introduction to series “Super ‘70s and ‘80s.”

Introduction to subseries “The Plastic Man Comedy Show” (including list of interviewees).

Getting to know Mark Taylor was one of the most moving aspects of this experience for me. I will not elaborate because you will soon see why, but I will say that during our actual conversation, there was a lot of “Wow,” “My gosh,” “You are an inspiration,” and the like from me. In transcribing, I have cut that out so you can mentally insert your own reactions as you read.

NOTE: Some of Mark’s turns-of-a-phrase in e-mail showed that he was able to snap right back into Plastic Man mode. My favorite was a time when he had to reschedule a talk:

“You have to be flexible if you’re going to deal with Plastic Man.”

How did you get the job on Plastic Man?

It’s coincidental. I was doing comedy in San Francisco and doing a little acting, modeling, commercial work.

One of my agents [told me that there was] an audition for this cartoon character. My interest was not at all in doing in a children’s show. This was about an hour out of San Francisco. I declined to do it. Most auditions aren’t fruitful. And then I realized that on the weekday afternoon of that audition I just happened to have a lunchtime college gig in that area. I thought, well, I’m in the area anyway so it was convenient. I called her back and said let’s do it. They liked it and I got the job.

Do you remember what you had to do the for the audition?

I think I had to read script and see if I could get in the ballpark of that voice. They had a couple of different cartoon voices. I was looking for a voice similar to Don Adams’s Get Smart. I was a fairly trim fit guy and if they just added a little shoulder muscle

Introduction to series “Super ‘70s and ‘80s.”

Introduction to subseries “The Plastic Man Comedy Show” (including list of interviewees).

How did you get the job of packaging Plastic Man for syndication? Don’t the big companies like Ruby-Spears typically do that themselves?

Arlington Television was a divisional offshoot of Golden West Television which at the time was owned by Jeff Simmons. I had produced and directed many TV shows for Jeff in the five years prior to Plastic Man. When Arlington made the deal with Ruby-Spears to repackage Plastic Man, Jeff Simmons told them he had just the guy to create the shows.

I got a call from Simmons in which he said, cryptically, “Son, Plastic Man looms large in your future” and I said “Who?” I had about three days before my interview with Ruby-Spears to create a show using wraparounds to introduce the library of cartoons. I figured who better to introduce the cartoons than Plastic Man himself. I’d been a fan of Captain Satellite, a character who hosted cartoon shows on a local San Francisco Bay Area station when I was a kid. I think I finalized the idea for the pitch on the plane to LA and I’m sure I heard some of the ideas for the first time as they came out of my mouth during the meeting.

[At the offices of] Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, I pitched them my idea of a live Plastic Man hosting the show from the Plasti-Jet and talking directly to the young viewers as friends. They bought the creative concept on the spot. I got the gig with full control to produce it in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What does packaging for syndication typically entail? Shortening the running time?

Re-packaging for syndication usually entails changing the format and structure of the show. They wanted to go from once a week to five days a week. That meant they need 130 half-hour shows, which is five days a week for six months, and then it starts again. A re-packaged show is actually a new entity separate from the original, but containing some of the same content. We edited some of the cartoons and segments to fit time frames.

Did you ever have to ask for new animated material?

Not really. We just edited animated material that already existed into our show format. That’s how our live Plastic Man has conversations with the animated Chief. We used inter-cuts and editing of phrases the Chief spoke to Plastic Man in the cartoons to have her speak to our live-action Plastic Man.

What was the process like to get approval from DC Comics?

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