Artist Sean Phillips on His Many-Sided Craft, from Comics to Criterion Covers

Phillips’s evolution as a comics artist has included a few major shifts in his approach. After the “clean and fresh” look of those early comics, Phillips spent a few years doing full-color painted comics for 2000 AD before breaking into the U.S. market with a new style. “When I started doing black-and-white work again on [DC horror comic] Hellblazer, I had to totally reinvent the way I did it, because how I used to draw didn’t suit it anymore.” Armed with a new inky, rough-hewn line, Phillips leaned into genres like horror and crime—“dark and shadowy and indoors, mostly”—where he has done the bulk of his work over the past thirty years.

These days, “I tend to draw stories that suit the way I draw anyway,” Phillips says. That’s due in part to the unusual longevity of his ongoing collaboration with writer Ed Brubaker. For much of his career, like most work-for-hire comics artists, Phillips worked with a variety of writers and editors. In 1999, he was brought in to ink over Michael Lark’s pencils on the second issue of Scene of the Crime, written by Brubaker. The two men found that their approaches meshed well. They followed that up a few years later with twenty-four issues of Sleeper for DC/WildStorm before taking the risky plunge into full creative ownership.

“We both came to the same decision at the same time, to try to have a bit more control over our careers. Ed was writing Captain America at the time and getting frustrated with having his epic spy stories derailed by crossovers and stuff. And I’d just drawn Marvel Zombies [with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman] and become an ‘overnight success’ after working for twenty-five years,” Phillips says. Despite the fact that Marvel Zombies was one of Marvel’s top-selling comics of 2006, Phillips had no communication from the publisher in the year-and-a-half break between volumes 1 and 2. “They didn’t say, ‘Well done, here’s another job,’ and so I was scrabbling around for stuff to do. And I realized that this happens to everybody. All the artists I grew up reading went out of fashion. Or their editors left, or a million reasons why somebody won’t get any work anymore. And it happens to everyone, even the really good ones. So I thought, What if I own my own work? I’d have a bit more control of it. There’s no one who can tell me that I can’t do it anymore. It just so happened to be coming at the right time, [when both Ed and I could] afford to take two months away from paying work and gamble on doing something for ourselves. And it worked okay. So there’s no reason to stop.”

Criminal no. 1, the pair’s first creator-owned comic, hit shelves in October 2006, and the two have never looked back, creating a library of crime stories that rivals the oeuvre of Jim Thompson or Walter Mosley. (Criterion fans might especially enjoy The Fade Out, set in Hollywood in the early days of the blacklist.) Most creative partnerships in comics last for a few years at most. The average American marriage lasts just over eight years. The Brubaker-Phillips partnership is still going strong at year 23. What’s the secret to their longevity? “Well, we live six thousand miles apart,” Phillips jokes. But it’s even simpler than that. “I like what he writes, and he likes what I draw. And we sort of leave it at that, really. I never have anything to do with the stories, and he never really has anything to do with what I draw, unless I do something really terrible. We meet up every few years at a show or somewhere, and that’s enough. We never talk on the phone, maybe twice in twenty years . . . But we don’t need to. We totally trust each other to do the work.”

Within the stability of that partnership, Phillips still finds room for technical experimentation. Recently, he had the opportunity to revisit some of the skills he honed in adolescence. “Ed and I did a book a few years ago called My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, and we did that because I wanted to do a romance comic, to try and apply some of the things I think I’ve gotten better at over the years to a subject matter that I tackled so long ago. So that book had no spotted blacks in it; it was all linear artwork, and all the atmosphere came through in the color.”

The color on that book was provided by another collaborator who has become very important to Phillips’s work: his eldest son, Jacob Phillips. Jumping in fresh out of art school to help meet an unexpectedly tight deadline, Jacob has since become an indispensable part of the Criminal team. “He turned out to be a really good colorist, to my relief,” his father says. “And to Ed’s relief, especially.” The younger Phillips employs a more graphic approach that eschews dimensionality or realism and instead highlights the drawn quality of his father’s work.

Then there are those projects outside of narrative comics—from spot illustrations for the movie tributes published in the back pages of the monthly Criminal comics to Criterion covers. Those projects give Phillips an opportunity to try new techniques or tools. “It’s a lot easier to change it up on an individual illustration rather than a hundred pages of comics. I might make some decisions on page 2 of a comic thinking it’s going to work for the next ninety-eight pages and it doesn’t, and then you’ve penciled yourself into a corner. Literally.” Even in those outlier projects, though, Phillips is always focused on telling the story that needs to be told. “It really depends on the project. You can’t shoehorn in something just because it’s cool.”

For projects like these, Phillips often looks for inspiration beyond the world of comics—in particular, the work of midcentury editorial illustrators such as Austin Briggs and Noel Sickles, which he initially discovered through the “women’s magazines” his grandmother read. That influence might have remained subliminal if not for an enterprising fan of Phillips’s comics work some years back. “A fan of mine in Canada, I think, used to work for [comics artist] Howard Chaykin, and one of his jobs was tearing the illustrations out of old magazines and filing them for Howard,” Phillips says. “He ended up having lots of doubles, and he thought I might be interested in them. So I did a little painting of Batman in exchange for about a thousand tear sheets. I kept the ones I liked, discarded the ones I didn’t like, and spent years scanning and cleaning up scans and then put them together as a book that I can look at for inspiration. It was really interesting to try to decipher how they did it. It’s only in the last ten years that I’ve really managed to study it more. The influence is growing, I think.”

That forensic instinct—to reverse-engineer how older illustrations were made—is a recurring theme in Phillips’s process. “Someone also sent me a set of Famous Artists correspondence courses from the late fifties. That was brilliant because it actually told you what materials they used. I knew what watercolor was, I knew what gouache was because I’d started with a little bit at school, but to actually see it broken down in stages to how you lay the paint down and build up a picture was very informative. One day I would like to sit down and actually work my way through it. I think like the first page is ‘draw a cup’ or an apple or something. It’d be nice to start from there and train myself how to do it properly. Because I just picked this stuff up by perseverance over the years.”

Criterion projects have provided Phillips with opportunities to put those tear sheets and correspondence courses to good use. Some of his cover images have had very specific jumping-off points, like those for Mister Johnson and Breaker Morant, whose juxtaposition of line art with more painterly rendering is a digital reimagining of an old Coby Whitmore technique, and that for In the Heat of the Night, which makes direct stylistic reference to the iconic original theatrical poster by Paul Crifo. Most often, Phillips taps into that midcentury period more broadly, pulling off the impressive trick of making work that evokes a specific time and place without feeling like a pastiche. Or as he self-effacingly puts it: “It always looks like I did it, no matter how much I try to make it look like I didn’t.”

While Phillips enjoys all this film-related work, he finds that it’s not without its downsides. “Watching films or watching TV now, I can’t help but dissect it as I’m watching it. It’s very hard to not look at it as an artist and just get caught up in the story. You’re always thinking about how that was framed and how that was lit or why did they cut from that piece to that piece. It spoils it a little bit. That voice is always there in your head, sort of analyzing everything.” Still, working on these projects “keeps me on my toes,” he says.

But as invigorating as those illustration projects may be for him, comics are still Phillips’s bread and butter, and where he finds the most creative fulfillment. Under its “no-look” deal with its current publisher, Image Comics, the Brubaker-Phillips team has complete autonomy. “They might just say, ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ And we say, ‘Yeah,’ and it happens. So it would be quite hard to go back to working for somebody else now.”

Alongside new volumes in their outstanding Reckless series, the pair’s next project is a deconstruction of their Eisner Award–winning 2020 graphic novel Pulp. Called The Process Edition, the new volume will show the full process for every single page: “All the scripts, all the pencils, all the thumbnails, cover sketches . . . Just really going into the nuts and bolts of how to make a book.”

And they show no signs of slowing down. “There will always be a Brubaker-Phillips book out,” Phillips promises. “At least two a year. Until we get too old.”