This Summer and Fall, Cox is stretching his design muscle a bit as he and his design team work to put together a new line of stationery sets featuring some of today's most interesting (and eclectic) commercial artists. The first sets of the line, called Dark Horse Deluxe Stationery Exotique, are in stores now, with more waves in the very near future.
I recently sat with Cox in his office crammed with memoribilia and artifacts of pop culture to speak about what lead him to comics, how he came to America, and the recent work on the stationery line.
Adam Gallardo: You're from England, yes?
Mark Cox: Yes, that is correct.
AG: Where in England are you from?
MC: I was born just outside of Oxford, in the South of England, in a little town called Abingdon. It's a little medieval town, famous for having the MG sports car factory located there at one time. My dad worked there for a while . . .
AG: My impression of England, never having been there, is that everything is very close to everything else.
MC: That's absolutely true.
AG: So, were you in London a lot, growing up?
MC: Actually, I moved to London and I lived there for twelve years before I came out here. But, where I grew up is only 60 miles away from London. And that's one of the obvious differences between the UK and the US - everything is so much further apart here. That's why, you know, England is incredibly creative but also very faddish; there is always a new sensation going on there that instantly grips the whole nation's imagination because it has a such a small distance to travel, whereas here ideas take a lot longer to get across the country and filter into the culture.
AG: That seems to be less true, now - everyone has MTV and cable, ideas seem to spread more or less instantaneously.
MC: Yes and no. Its still a very big country and Middle America can be very hard to impress -- things take a long time to filter through, but when they do, they seem to stick.
AG: When you were so close to London and living in London, was that when you started to get exposure to Pop culture and graphics and art and things like that?
MC: Well, I have always been obsessed with Pop culture. I love buying records and going to see bands and movies and exhibitions and stuff. I studied graphics at college. I have always been able to draw so it was natural. I was always on an art path. And then when I went to college I had to make a decision, do I want to do graphics or fine art? And I figured I'd take the money and go for -- [Laughs] -- and go the commercial route. I couldn't imagine people paying me eight hours a day to sit down and paint so . . . That was where it all started to go wrong. [Laughs]
AG: So how does a boy from Oxford, England end up in Portland, Oregon at Dark Horse Comics?
MC: Well, I moved to London after I left college, then I got various graphics and design jobs. I worked for Conde Nast Publishers for a while, then went on to work at some advertising agencies. Finally I ended up going free-lance. I was looking for clients and I walked past a comic shop one day in Central London and saw a sign in the window that said they were looking for designers. I liked the comics a lot when I was younger, but then I reached "that certain age" and they became a lot less important to me. But there was a time when I would buy every comic I possibly could. I would hunt out American comics, religiously, when I went on holiday to the coast or something. You'd find these little stores full of them -- and they were not the sort of things you could buy in your neighborhood, you know, at that point. But I would buy English comics religiously, every week. Every time they launched a new one I'd have to rush out and buy it. So I always had an interest in comics, but, as I say, I saw this sign, and thought I might add to my free-lance connections. I applied to them and they ended up offering me a full time job as Art Editor.
AG: Where was that? Marvel UK?
MC: No, it was actually at Titan Books.
AG: OK.
MC: Yeah. They were working with DC a lot at the time -- it was the mid-80s so it was during that huge comics explosion. Dark Knight had just come out, Watchmen was just coming out; so it was a very, very exciting time to get in. And it kind of allowed me to come in, because at that point, the comics world was looking to the outside world. It had almost been frozen in ice for fifty years, and it really hadn't changed at all. And suddenly, everyone decided, "Oh, why not apply what we do in the outside world to comics?" The story-telling and art were changeing dramatically at this point which allowed myself and others were able to come in and start using some of the skills that we had been using outside and do things in a different way. It was interesting to bring things from outside comics. To actually sit down and design them and try to put in new ideas and see how we could change things. It was a very exciting time.
AG: Excellent.
MC: So, I worked for Titan and then I was offered the position as Art Director with Tundra UK which was just starting up, and I worked with them for a while - a year and a half. I then moved on to Marvel UK and I was the art director there for a couple of years. And then Dark Horse was looking for someone and, luckily for me there really aren't that many art directors, you know, in the world of comics to choose from--
AG: Right.
MC: --because there are only a certain number of companies, so there aren't that many people who have had the same experience that I have had. And Dark Horse was looking for someone who had a track record and also knew what they were doing, and they called me and it seemed like an adventure that would be fun to do.
AG: And now it's eight years later!
MC: Yeah.
AG: All right. Well, for people who don't know what an art director does exactly, can you tell us a little bit about that?
MC: Well, the duties of that role do vary depending on the company. Here, my role is to oversee and run the design department, so I have a staff of six designers that I manage and work with. We basically put together all the editorial pages for the comics - the inside front covers, credits pages, letter columns. We put the front covers together, design logos for them. On top of that, we design the advertising and marketing material, and a lot of the packaging and concept work on the products. So, yeah, we are kept very, very busy.
AG: Right.
MC: And to a certain extent, I work with the editors and oversee the cover layouts, making sure the cover sketches are strong and that there is space left for logos, and that kind of stuff. So, you know, I am basically responsible for a lot of the way the company projects itself to the outside world, graphically and design-wise. So that is kind of my role here.
AG: So you mentioned working on product development projects, and Dark Horse now has a line of stationery coming out from the Product Development area on which you're very closely involved. Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?
MC: Yes, it's something that Dark Horse has wanted to do for a long time. We started discussing it a few years ago. A lot of what we do is printed ink on paper, and we were looking for a way to find different formats to extend that out into. We liked the idea of stationery and we had a number of discussions about it, but we really hadn't come up with a solid idea of how to do it. So I kind of had a flash of inspiration at one of those meetings and had a few ideas started kicking around in my head. One of the things that I really wanted to do was to produce something that would be fairly unique in the market. I was very inspired by the Sanrio/Hello Kitty stuff and similar Japanese stationery sets, but I wanted to do something that would highlight artists whose work I liked and that I'd had an immediate response to. I like the whole "low brow" art scene here in America and there are a lot of those artists that I felt had a huge commercial potential but, really, consumers were not having a chance to be exposed to them; it is a very underground kind of thing. I'd had a reaction -- quite an immediate reaction looking at a lot of these artists' work and felt others would feel the same way. It's a style that is very similar to Pop art in a lot of ways, and, from its title, "low brow", you can see it as an art of the people. It's popular with the kind of people that buy Rock 'n' Roll records, enjoy the odd cocktail (or two) and monster movies. It's a very Rock 'n' Roll style of artwork, I think.
AG: It seems to be a style that evolved out of Punk Rock posters and the Punk esthetic . . .
MC: Absolutely, yeah. Coop, for example, has done a lot of poster work for that scene, along with people like Frank Kozik, so they bring with them that strong bold style. Other influences are, you know, Robert Williams, the Godfather of the whole scene, pretty much. He was instrumental in creating Juxtapoz Magazine, which is devoted to covering that style of art. There's "Big Daddy" Roth, hot rods, pin-up girls, all of those things are elements in the movement.
AG: You mentioned Coop, who else are you working with on these stationery sets?
MC: Well, the artist that we've worked with most is Shag. He's probably the most well-known of all of the so-called low brow artists (as well as having put out some of my favorite instumental-surf discs). He has really broken out very dramatically. You know, you see his greeting cards and various merchandise everywhere and we were thrilled when he liked the idea of doing stationery, and he was very important in us getting the line off the ground. His paintings make me very happy.
The first artist we approached was a local artist, Martin Ontiveros. I'd seen his work around -- he painted a backdrop here in Portland at a local rock club, Satyricon. I remember seeing that and thinking, "Wow, that's an amazing piece." And I'd seen him in the local magazine the Stranger - not Stranger, its the ...
AG: Mercury.
MC: The Mercury. I had been very impressed, and I'd seen examples of his work in friends' houses. I'd go in someone's house or party and, Ah!, see these amazing paintings. I thought that he was one person, again, who if people saw his work for the first time they would immediately love. And he was one of the first people that I thought of for this project. Also, there's Lisa Petrucci, an artist from Seattle. Her work features kind of cute little girls and cats, but theres often an edge to the work that she does, very influenced by sexy pin-up art and kitsch, you know, 70's kitsch - "big-eyed girl" art like Keane and Lee and that whole school. So there is a lot going on with her art, too. And I thought she would be very appealing to a female audience, and my research tells me that stationery is predominantly bought by women. That is something that I felt would work well in this format. And something else about the low brow art - um - genre. I think traditionally female artists have really always been looked down on in the classical world of art. It was predominantly a boys club and female artists really weren't allowed to start breaking through until quite recently. But with low brow, that is certainly not the case. It seems to embrace them, and there is a lot of interesting work being produced by female artists in the genre - artists like Lisa, Liz McGrath, Niagara, Isabel Samaras, and Sas Christian to name but a few. So that all seems to come together quite well.
So those are the first four sets. Two by Shag, one by Lisa and one from Martin. The second batch has Coop who we have already mentioned. Very excited to be working with him. He has a very strong fan base. There's also Shepard Fairey who's Obey Giant project has been running for like ten years now. His work is amazing. It's kind of a graffiti, street-tagging project which is very strong with skaters and that crowd. He is very influenced by a mixture of skate culture, punk rock and Russian propaganda posters, so its very strong and iconic and easily identifiable, so that has been exciting to work on too. And also, there are two more sets by Shag which are called "Dangerous Women" and "The Coolest Ghouls". It doesn't get much better than that.!
AG: It's interesting, Dark Horse being a comics publisher, that none of these artists you've named so far are comics artists. Except for Martin -- didn't he do a book with Mike Allred?
MC: Actually he did, yeah. He inked it I think, was it Crash . . .?
AG: Crash Metro.
MC: Yeah, Crash Metro. And he did have a comic that he was planning to do with Oni, which never really came to fruition. I'd LOVED to have seen that. He's actually doing a series of giant Robot books for younger kids which are really popular with the guy behind those Captain Underpants books - Dav Pilkey.
AG: But its odd that we aren't working with more comics artists. Was there something about the aesthetic driving the stationery sets which precluded using comics artists?
MC: No, not really. The whole line has really been an experiment. As we know, the climate with comics has really changed dramatically in the time I have been with Dark Horse and I wanted to see if we could do something that would work outside of that area. It is really designed to find out what we can sell in the world outside of comic shops. But it wasn't a conscious decision to not use comic artists. In fact, I do plan, hopefully, to do a set that would all feature work from comic artists that I really like too and that I think would have a similar appeal. These sets are distributed through Diamond to comic stores and they have been very supportive actually - which I am very thankful for. Actually everyone who has seen them has loved them and been very positive.
I actually see a lot of the art we are using here to be on the outskirts of the comic book world. I think, like Pop art, low brow is influenced by comic art too. It's on the outer limits of the comic book world but there is a strong influence and so I think that is part of the reason why the comic stores have embraced it. So I definitely have plans in the back of my head feature comics artists and hopefully we will see that next year.
AG: Lisa Petruccia said that one of the reasons she has enjoyed working on the stationery is because she sees it as a way of disseminating fine art, things you might only see in galleries, in this very accessible way. Was that in your mind at all when you were putting this together? Or was that just a happy accident?
MC: Oh, definitely. I mean, you know, these are all artists that I like and I thought that they - I felt they all had the potential of reaching a much wider audience. And this format that we have created is actually very cheap to buy- it's only five bucks. Cheaper than a cocktail and it lasts longer. And that is the opposite of how the art world works. Original artwork usually sells for a lot of money. As do Limited edition prints and all that, so collecting is prohibitive the average person on the street. So, yeah, one of the reasons why a lot of the artists are drawn to this, I think, is they see it as very affordable, and its at the opposite end of the art world scale. No one else is really working in this area or in this price range. But they are great gift items and great impulse buys. It's a great way of collecting this cool art. Its funny, I've already seen them on Ebay for twice the price.
AG: The hallmark of success!
MC: Yeah, I see them being collectible in the long run but the plan isn't to keep reprinting these. I'd rather that the print run sell out and then we move on and do a second set from the artist, and a third set.
AG: Right.
MC: I would like them to have some kind of collectibility.
AG: So when you were putting together the plan for the stationery, in this day of email and instant messaging, and pager text and all that kind of thing, were you worried about, people would even be attracted to this old-fashioned thing that goes through the mail?
MC: Yeah, that's an interesting point. And to be honest, I was kind of oblivious to it at the start. [Laughs]It really didn't occur to me - I was just excited about the artwork. I know everyone is a collector at heart, and I thought that if it is attractive enough, that people would buy it. I don't believe that everyone is necessarily going to send out every sheet. But I think also I had in the back of my mind that the template for this came from Japan. It's very much inspired, as I said, by the Sanrio sets and I have always seen Japan as a very technologically advanced society, and I figured if the two could co-exist there, then the same would be true here.
AG: So, do you have any other projects like this in the future?
MC: We have expanded out the different kinds of things we are doing with these artists. We have just started creating some ring-bound journals, we have done one for Lisa and we are going to be doing one for Shepard Fairey and Coop, too. We've also done one for Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey. Theres a very cool coaster set in a tin that we have just created with Shag. And yeah, I'd love to expand out as far as we can; I'd love to do T-shirts and I think it is important for buyers and shops to be able to boutique this stuff, so I am very interested in expanding it out as far as it will go.
The first wave of Dark Horse Deluxe Stationery Exotique, which includes sets by Shag, Martin Ontiveros, and Lisa Petruccia are in stores now. The second wave, featuring more Shag, Shepards Fairey, and Coop, will be in stores September 18. The third wave, featuring Seonna Hong, Tim Biskup, Tony Millionaire and, you guessed it, Shag will be in stores November 20.