Anyone who reads comics has probably seen the colors and digital painting of Matt Hollingsworth grace some of their favorite titles. From Hellboy to Daredevil to Preacher to The Eternals, Matt’s added texture and unique hues to many great comics over the years, winning an Eisner Award (the comic book industry equivalent to the Oscar) for his efforts. Also forging a career in film, working on digital effects for the likes of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Superman Returns as well as the upcoming animated feature Surf’s Up, Hollingsworth has recently returned to comics full time. Here, he chats with D.J. about getting started, his career, and beer… glorious beer…

How’d you get into comics coloring professionally? Was it something you were always interested in?

Yeah, since I was a kid. At certain points, I thought I'd be a writer, a pilot or work in comics as an artist. Penciler, of course, when I was a kid. Eventually I settled on comics when I was in maybe 7th grade.

To break in, I went to the Kubert School in Jersey and worked my ass off. That, and I pursued the business side of it all far more aggressively than most of my classmates. I was balls out. I started going to Marvel and DC when I was in second year of a three-year program. Basically, I paid my own way through school with the help of scholarships and grants. And, I figured I HAD to get a job when I graduated or it was a waste of money and time. So, I worked really hard to make sure that happened. Anyway, I'd go to Marvel and DC on Fridays every month or so. I'd make five appointments at each place, calling the editors directly and asking to show my work. I'd hit one company in the AM, one in the PM, and see tons of folks. Then I'd return later with an entirely new portfolio, which they loved. Meant I was working at it. I took their advice, and they saw it in the next set. That didn't hurt either. I got really intense with all that in third year, in the second half. They let you specialize and make your own curriculum, so I did only inking and coloring and that's it. I turned out a lot of pages and sent them out, showed them in person, hit conventions. They'd see a lot of new pages each time they saw me, too. Mike Carlin noticed this. Meant I could turn around a lot of pages.

First real work was for Cry For Dawn, I think, #3. Black and white. They hired me to produce all art in one story, lettering, everything. So, I hired one roomie to pencil it, then I inked and painted it in black and white with water colors, gouache, and oils. And I hired another roomie to letter it, Jon Babcock. He ended up a letterer. We did that in March of third year, got school credit and got paid. Then I graduated in mid May of 1991, on a Wednesday. I got work from Mike Carlin at DC on an Action Comics Annual and from Marcus McLaurin at Marvel on Hellraiser doing painted color on the same day, the Friday after graduating. I was fucking stoked.

What was your time at the Kubert School like?

It was horrible and great at the same time. It was nearly all guys with maybe three girls out of 300 or so students. Something like that. And, with it being comics, there were far too many metal head stoner dudes. Sure, I liked a good number of them, but the culture was not diverse enough. But I met some great artists and had some as teachers. I met some guys I went to school with that I still know, too. I met Steve Lieber in line at school on our first day. It was our day for intro, and I met him in line for the art supplies. He was directly in front of me, drawing in his sketchbook. I could see what he was drawing, and he was so far above what I could do that I was both excited to be in a school with such people and also felt fucked, like I sucked. We chatted a bit. And we still know each other. He's a good artist in comics if you don't know. Look for White Out written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Steve.

Ah, anyway, lost my way. I liked some of my teachers and learned a lot from them; Dennis Corrigan, Mark Pennington, George Pratt, Joe Kubert. Dennis is the least known but the best teacher. He taught me color. I owe him tremendously. Some great classes and some crap classes. Luckily the great classes were truly great. If I had it to do over, I would go there again.

Coloring techniques have changed quite a bit over the years, with them infernal computers and tools like Photoshop becoming more and more essential. With your colors being known for their textured quality, do you now wonder how you lived without the new fangled tools?

Naw. Manually painting is a lot of fun, and I miss it sometimes. I think that those of us who started before digital was around actually have an edge on other folks, at least those of us who survived and made the transition. Knowing how to really paint with real paint can only be a good thing, and I think has helped me tremendously even in my digital work.

With all the comics you’ve worked on (and it’s a damn impressive list), what run, or single issue, do you look at most fondly so far?

Hmmm. Probably Daredevil. That was an overall good book to work on. Brian, Alex, and I were all on the same page with that one. We share a sense of dramatic storytelling, and Alex and I share an aesthetic, so it was a very natural fit and was nearly always fun. Incidentally, I am back on Daredevil now, though with Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark and Stefano Gaudiano this time.

After your award winning work on books such as Preacher, Hellboy, and Daredevil, you took a break from comics and got into film, working on digital effects for such flicks as Sky Captain and Superman Returns. What prompted the change to the big screen?

I had been working too heavily in comics for a long time and was doing five books a month, which is a bit much, and it was starting to burn me out. I was caring less about the work and getting less enjoyment from it. A friend of mine, Bruce Tartaglia, works at Dreamworks Animation, and he'd been in film for a while. He worked at Sony before, long ago, and at ESC working on The Matrix films. He's a good friend. Anyway, over the years, he'd asked me a couple of times if I had any interest in getting into film, and I'd always said no. We went to lunch in August of 2003, and he asked again, and this time I said yes. I then asked him what I should do to break in. We're talking Visual Effects with computers, CG. He told me to learn Maya first off and then we consulted on what else over time. He put me on the track to go to Gnomon School for Visual Effects in Hollywood, which at the time was pretty much a Maya school. They've since branched out more. Anyway, I started there in late September of 2003 and did a heavy ten-week course load that ran to early December. I created a pub in 3D, basically sticking with what I know best.

Anyway, finished that up, put together a print portfolio and sent that out. First interview was at Pixar, who flew me up. That felt good. Great interview but I didn't get it. Ack! Second interview was at Digital Domain, and they were, frankly, assholes. So, I did not call them to pursue it further and didn't get it. Third interview was at Stan Winston, for Sky Captain, and I got that gig. So, it took me eight months total from when I decided to make the leap to when I broke in. Broke in on tax day, April 15, 2004. Not too bad!!! Went on to work at Rhythm & Hues and Sony Imageworks on seven films total. And a touch of work at CafeFX.

Were there many differences in doing textures for film as opposed to your comics work?

Yeah, they're very different. I spent the bulk of my time texture painting, though did all manner of other effects work. I did lighting, FX animation (which are special effects like smoke, fire, ice, glass breaking, etc.), and various other 3D jobs as well. Those other jobs were nothing like comics and don't even share the same skill set or anything. Having an eye for color and a sense of design or just general art skills helps, of course, but it's entirely new software doing totally different things. Texture painting is more similar to coloring but still very different. In comics, I'm given a black and white drawing and paint it. In texture painting, I'm given a 3D model, a wireframe, and paint that. So, they're both painting, but in comics, it's not only 2D, I am painting lighting. In textures, you want to remove light so that the textures don't have false lighting baked into them that competes with your real, CG lighting on the model. Well, usually, anyway. In texture painting, you're likely to do something like spend the day painting feathers, painting the whole look of the feather onto a model. This will include opacity maps to break up the edge of the feather, bump maps to give it bumpiness, specular maps to break up the highlight, ktr/translucency maps to indicate how thick the surface is for backlighting and such, and a color map, as well as others sometimes. This is pretty intricate for a feather. And you can find yourself literally painting feathers for weeks or months and little else. It's slow and time consuming. There's a back and forth constantly with your supervisors. Or you can have a wide variety of things to work on. At Sony, on Surf's Up, I'd often be going back and forth from foliage to penguins to wood to surf boards. So, that was a lot more fun to have a lot of variety.

By contrast, in comics, you probably color an entire issue in one week, 22 to 24 pages or so in seven or eight days maybe. You can't go back and forth too much, can't tweak every detail of every little piece of everything. It's quicker and dirtier, but it's also more satisfying in a lot of ways. In film, sometimes you lose sense of ownership over your work. With the constant changes and with having to fit with everyone else on the film, you often go against your own beliefs, compromise or just paint a tiny part of the overall world. Sometimes so many hands are on it, and this combined with all the changes, leads to a loss of pride and a loss of feeling that the art is in fact your art. It's no longer your art. It's sometimes even a thing you barely recognize. In comics, there are some changes, but overall, it's a much smaller team, doing work much faster, and there are far less changes. The vision in the work is usually your own vision.

Though you continued to work in comics while doing the movies, you’ve since returned in a big way, even being requested by none other than Neil Gaiman to color his revival of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals with artist John Romita Jr. for Marvel. How’s it feel to be back in the comics full time?

Honestly, I'm renewed and am digging it. When I went into CG, I got in this heavy burn on learning everything, from every software all at once. Like learning on speed but without the speed. I thrived on it and loved that. I've kind of put that back into Photoshop. I've been using that software for ten years now and know it very well. But, after that long, sometimes you stop looking into the nooks and crannies of the software. But since my return, I've been looking at every menu again, trying everything out again, reading more. Learning a lot. Don't ever be so arrogant as to think you know everything about a particular piece of software. There's always something you don't know.

So, the painting has been fun. And I am doing less work, less pages. Which is very nice. Some days it still feels like all I do is work, and I don't like those days, but it's the nature of the beast. Once I finish the last issue of The Eternals my schedule will ease a bit as that's a slow book for me. Takes a while to do. Being back on Daredevil is great, too. I think we're all having a lot of fun working together again, and everybody's always jazzed about what we're doing. So, we kind of all feed off of each other, try to keep that bar raised as high as we can. And Iron Fist is great, too. Just finished the first issue of that, and it's another team that I really like. The artist is a guy named David Aja from Spain, and he and I share an aesthetic and are a good fit. Same with the writers (Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction). And the editor, Warren Simons and I work well together, I think. Nice fit overall. So, I don't have any bad gigs. Nice!

And I still use some of my CG skills. I still use Python for programming all the time, for infrastructure bullshit. Any tedious, automatable task is given to my robot slaves.

The mind is engaged, the passion is there, and I have enough time to do each page right. And there's pride in the work. So it's all good.

You’ve mentioned that Daredevil, coloring the beginning of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev’s historic run, was a favorite job of yours and that you’ve now taken over the colors for their successors, Ed Brubaker and Mike Lark. How are you going to approach it? Does it feel similar to the Bendis and Maleev pages?

Well, I didn't color just the beginning of the run. I colored, I think, 36 issues in a 54 or 55 issue run.

Anyway, no, it feels very different. I've only done three issues so far, but it's entirely different. I've worked with those guys before, though on various books; Catwoman, Gotham Central, Batman: Nine Lives and probably more that's skipping my mind. So, I already am comfortable with them and like working with them. The art is obviously very different, but my color sense is the same. The first arc is in Europe, which is unusual for DD. It's fun, a nice swashbuckling adventure kind of thing. More James Bond and less Hell's Kitchen than the Bendis stuff. And the art is a bit more open than Alex's stuff. It's still got a lot of blacks, but they leave a lot open and indicate lighting with lines marking plane breaks and that kind of thing. It's kind of Tothy.

Another passion of yours is beer (something beloved by all of us at “the footnote,” often while attempting to proofread our updates) -- you’ve even judged at some tasting contests, right?

Yeah, I'm a hardcore beer geek. Which is not to say I'm a beer snob. I grew out of that years and years ago. I don't like Budweiser or that kinda stuff, but there's nothing technically wrong with it other than having a shitty-ass recipe. The underlying science of what's going on is sound. I just don't like the flavor. But why judge people? Just like with music. I think people have the right to their bad bands and their bad beer.

That being said, yes, I am a beer geek. I was in the Oregon Brew Crew in Portland. It's a heavy beer culture up there, and I lived there for nine years. I don't remember what year it was, but at some point, I decided to start brewing at home. Just like with CG learning, I became absolutely obsessed with it. I read everything. I read literally dozens and dozens of books, full books, on brewing and beer styles and all that. I spent almost all of my free time on beer for about two years solid. I didn't join the Brew Crew at first because I thought the idea was a bit weird. All these brewers getting together and brewing, drinking and all that. Sure, sounds good now, but at the time, I saw some of their recipes and write ups and honestly thought they looked like crap. This was later proven totally false, obviously. Again, don't be too arrogant to learn from someone else.

Anyway, instead I was part of an online home brewing group and entered their competition with my beers. I bottled them and sent them off to New Jersey for judging. I was expecting a critique that I could learn from but instead won three medals. Some gold in there, but I can't really remember what. That was surprising. Then I met a guy from the Oregon Brew Crew, and he talked me into going to a meeting. I jumped in wholeheartedly. Entered tons of competitions in Texas, Washington, Oregon and such and won a buncha medals. Judged in Oregon. They asked me to teach the judges about hops, to actually teach the class on hops, but I ended up in a deadline situation, so could not.

I even won the Collaborator contest. This was sponsored by Widmer Brewing in Portland, the guys who made the Hefeweizen style big in the US. When I won that, I got to go to Widmer and make my beer, which was an India Pale Ale, on their equipment for commercial release in their pub. The deal was that you could go and just watch the guy brewing the beer or do as much or as little as you wanted. Naturally, I went and told the guy that I wanted to do literally everything. That I didn't want him to do a single thing other than tell me what to do, because I didn't know his equipment. So, I brewed the beer with his aid, cleaned out the giant mash tun, and did all physical labor. It was great. It was a twelve barrel batch, so 24 kegs of my beer released. And in it's first day of release at their pub, they sold three full kegs, or 372 pints of my beer, in one pub. YES!

I don't brew anymore. I'm in an apartment, and that's no hobby for an apartment as far as I'm concerned.

Ah… beer… beer… Uh, anyway, um… how many books are you currently working on? Is there time to sleep? And what’s coming up?

Three books; The Eternals, Daredevil and Iron Fist, which is coming out in November. Also, just wrapped The Escapists for Dark Horse and some DC origin stories with Brian Bolland for a book called 52. We did Animal Man in #19 and The Joker for #29. The Joker stuff recalls The Killing Joke quite a lot and is very nice.

Nothing else planned at the moment. Maybe an Alcatraz comic.

(Lightning round…)

Tastiest beer?

Wow, big question. Belgian's make the best beer of anyone, even the Germans, British, or Irish. Or Americans. But it depends on what flavor you want. I like most of the Trappist ales from Belgium. Duvel, too. And, the Canadians make some nice Belgian style ales, from Unibroue, Maudite, La Fin Du Monde, Trois Pistoles, etc. The Brits make some killer beer, too, but it rarely survives the trip to the US. Most suck once they get here. Fuller's Vintage Ale is just about the ONLY one. It's amazing. If you make the trip to the UK, I like the entire line of Youngs. They rock, especially on cask. Ah, and any cans here are in good shape, whether the beer is good or not.

Batman or Daredevil?

Daredevil. Much more interesting than a rich kid to me. Batman rocks, of course, but come on. Can anyone relate to that guy? It's great and classic and noirish. And I love working on Batman, but Daredevil is actually something I like better. I'm biased, of course, because I work on Daredevil. I really love the icon of Batman and love the design and even the character, but to me it's more believable to see DD be tough with his origin.

Favorite movie? Not best, necessarily, just the one you love the most and can watch over and over…

Tombstone.

That brown stuff on Jesus de Sade’s hand (Preacher Vol. 2: Until the End of the World)… it was chocolate, right? I mean… right?

Yeah, that's chocolate, you sick fucker.

What’d I forget to ask you?

Fuck if I know. My sack is heavy, if that's what you mean.