EVANSTON, Ill. — Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. But what happened to good pop culture conspiracies? Like, Paul McCartney is dead. Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing. Walt Disney was frozen. Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. Katy Perry is JonBenét Ramsey. Political conspiracy has overtaken pop culture conspiracy, so I would like to offer a fresh one: Alex Ross, on the North Shore of Chicago, toiling on Marvel and DC comics since the early 1990s, is the actual architect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Not its active creator, but its true, quiet catalyst, the wind beneath its wings.
The secret secret sauce.
We met the other day at Comix Revolution in Evanston, not so I could pepper him with conspiracies but because he has a new book, “Fantastic Four: Full Circle.” Ross has been known for decades as the industry’s marquee cover artist, an illustrating legend on the Mount Rushmore of modern superhero artists, the missing link no one was looking for between Norman Rockwell and Spider-Man. This is his first book in years as an artist and writer. It also arrives as Marvel is gearing up for a new Fantastic Four movie.
Hmmm.
It looks like a movie, or at least concept art from one, slapped against an homage to 1960s Jack Kirby and the trippy influence of 1970s black-light posters. It’s also unmistakably vintage Ross, which, unlike traditional comic art, is painted, in a photorealistic style, sometimes using live models. Hence his nickname: The Norman Rockwell of comics. He’s heard it before, as well as the suspicion he inspired the MCU.
“No, I have no input in a FF movie,” he sighed. “No, I have not worked on the films.”
Which is what he would say, right!?!
More likely, Ross is closer to a pivotal innovation on the golden road that led to the MCU than some organizing force. He’s heard this before, too. In the early 1990s, he made his name on a pair of limited series comics: “Marvels” for Marvel, with writer Kurt Busiek, and “Kingdom Come” for DC, with writer Mark Waid. Both — “Marvels” in earthier fashion than the widescreen mythological operatics of “Kingdom Come” — offered something rarely seen: a snapshot of a fantasy world as it might actually look if it were real. Ross wasn’t dressing famous faces in capes and boots and cowls; the minister at the center of “Kingdom Come,” for example, was modeled on his own father, a minister in real life.
Ross made iconic characters that had previously lived only as pen and ink seem tangible in the real world. Or as Stan Lee described in the introduction to a 2012 reissue of “Marvels,” not until Ross “had that universe seemed quite so undeniably authentic, so unquestionably credible.”
Ross said he’s heard in meetings with studio executives that his images — and their attention to the texture of fabrics and the lighting of an action scene — have provided a sort of road map for what was possible in live-action features. In fact, before the dawn of the superhero boom, when film adaptations veered toward stylized, kitschy landscapes, Ross designed Spider-Man’s suit for the first Sam Raimi movie, though it wasn’t used.
Still, now and then, Ross said, “I watch a movie and, yeah, I feel reverberations.”
Standing alongside him in a comic book store, I felt them, too.
His “Fantastic Four” book was not to be found; it had only come out that morning and was already sold out. But behind us was a long shelf of his work, some old, some new, such as his covers for current runs of “Black Panther” and “Captain America.” His were obvious, marked not by the colorful caricature of classic comics, but by the shadings and austerity of painted portraits.
The irony is, more than 30 years after he made his debut, Ross feels himself in a curious competition these days with the movie versions of those same characters.
“The new movie takes on superheroes,” he said, “do affect everything (in the print world of comics). They immediately alter aesthetics. You are now competing with something that can only outperform me, but I can be a force of consistency. I can continue the history.” A few years ago, for Marvel’s New York publishing headquarters, he painted a long mural of nearly three dozen Marvel characters, stretching the length of its lobby. He took the job, he said, “not to reflect, ‘What does Alex Ross think these characters should be?’ I took it to preserve the original image of them — before Hollywood got to them.”
He pointed at an issue of “Captain America” and smiled:
“I’m just trying to save the little wings on the side of his head.”
Eventually, he said, there’ll be a new Fantastic Four movie. His new book is not a blueprint but, as he explains, a pop-art hybrid, intending to “commune” with the 1960s origins of the characters, without losing contemporary flair. It’s less wordy than old Marvel comics, and despite the detailed, lifelike figures, the colors and designs — if not the fractured, cluttered busyness — are pure 1961. “What Kirby made was beautiful and perfect as it is, but there are people who can’t see it now, so I wanted to draw everyone’s attention back to what was special about that time period — before we get this new adaptation.”
He thought a moment.
“Look, nobody claims reality as theirs,” he said. “Even Hal Foster was doing something like this long ago with the ‘Prince Valiant’ newspaper strip. There’s nothing new to this. But when I was in my 20s, in the early 1990s, I did want to weaponize the style.” He smiled at his own hubris. “If someone had to own it, I wanted to be that person! It’s what I trained to do at the Academy.” As in Chicago’s American Academy of Art, which — unlike the School of the Art Institute, its scholarly neighbor on Michigan Avenue — is known as a pragmatic training ground for the fine tuning of a trade.
“The Art Institute then wasn’t really set up to get people jobs in commercial art in Chicago,” he said. “It felt more like they trained people to be the best lottery winners they could be. My school, they trained you so people would pay you to do that thing.”
Ross grew up in Portland, Oregon, then traveled around the country with his family, from church to church, wherever his father worked. Because grandmothers on both sides of the family lived in Chicago, summer vacations were spent in Illinois. Also, his mother had attended the Academy. Chicago became the big city to him, and so he settled here. He graduated from the Academy in the late 1980s and went directly to work drawing the storyboards for advertising campaigns at the Leo Burnett agency in the Loop. He did it for three-and-a-half years, using his off-hours to edge into freelance at Marvel and DC.
By the mid-1990s, he met Busiek and created the acclaimed “Marvels,” then later the cult favorite “Astro City” for Image Comics — nearly three decades later, he’s still doing “Astro City” with Busiek and illustrator Brent Anderson. “Kingdom Come” came soon after, and Ross had hit his stride.
In a way, now 52, he remains that artist.
“Fantastic Four: Full Circle,” with its dizzying mash of style and homage, feels new. But otherwise, he still does the covers of a superhero series until the writer on the series leaves — such as the work he did for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Captain America” run. He still stands up for the often critically dismissed field of commercial illustration. He’s still “furious” about Chicago’s rejection of the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. (“It’s taken this town forever to embrace the deep roots of commercial art that exist here.”)
Ross is still making art, he said, “in the shadow of work I did when I was 25.”
Then he added: “But it’s a nice shadow.”
He’s done this long enough to see himself become an influence and to recognize more contemporary innovators. He grabbed a comic off the shelf titled “The Human Target,” illustrated by Greg Smallwood, and swooned over the lighting, the colors, the overall vibe.
“I’m still buying this stuff,” he said. “I’m still finding myself influenced all the time — constantly. But there’s only so much you can change me. There’s a lot of range within that, but no, I am a repeat factory. How many times can I remake the cover of Marvel Comics No. 1? How many covers can I do for a ‘Kingdom Come’ reissue? I feel like a one-trick pony. On the other hand, I feel it’s important to maintain a certain homogeneity. My intent was never to become the Norman Rockwell of comics, but I do love that image. If that has to be the standard I live up to, then it’s a good reason to keep going.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
