Wobby #31 – Good job👍: Insects and being nice to others
By Simone Vos
"When I make comics, rather than having a linear storyline, I try to create immersive scenes. What interests me most is creating a sort of mood that carries along the whole story. I feel like in my work sometimes places and environments are more important than characters which are just sort of passersby", states illustrator Marco Quadri (IT). For Wobby #31 - Good job, he made the cover and a 6-page comic spread. Together with John Broadley, who did the centerfold, he talks about his inspiration and his artistic process.
For the cover Marco got his inspiration from a conversation with a friend: "I was talking about developing together some sort of detective story set in a town of insects", he states. "The theme 'Good job' made me think of a hidden realm of creatures working far from the eyes of humans. So then I had the idea of this shoebox containing an office within, where a praying mantis does her job as a private investigator."
Marco has already created art for Wobby (numbers 23 and 27) and for this edition he also worked together with his friend and illustrator Luca Tellurio on the 6-page comic spread. Marco has a Bachelor in traditional printmaking techniques from the fine arts academy of Urbino and a Master in illustration at ISIA (focused on printed matter and books). He works mostly in Italy, where the comic books and illustration scene is very lively, he says.
Spread by Marco Quadri & Luca Tellurio for Wobby #31
Commissions vs. free work
John has also created work for Wobby before (number 12) and besides drawing and illustrating, he makes and publishes his own books. John graduated in Graphic Design from Liverpool Polytechnic (now John Moores University) in 1991. He specialized in illustration and had back then a very detailed and decorative style, just like some commissioned work now. "My commissions are very varied and I have to adopt a slight change to my style depending on the client. In the past twelve months I’ve been working for several magazines on a regular basis while at the same time illustrating children’s books, plus doing a bit of food packaging, an album cover, a tour poster for a US band, and some drawings for Quo Vadis restaurant, “where I’ve been the in-house artist for ten years now", John states.
"The Wobby commission is the closest in the way of working to my own self- published books. My own Wild For Adventure strip is the one place I can do whatever I like. I never plan the next panel, I just draw it and make it up as I go along", he says. "You can’t do that with a commission, it has to be planned and submitted to the client for approval before moving to the final version. The commissioned work tends to not be as free and loose as the work in my own books, but it is nice to see it on a new-stand or on a shelf in a shop."
Centrefold by John Broadley for Wobby #31
Share your joy
Marco works on commission, but he also has his own riso printer and a collective he's part of. "I have had a riso in my living room since 2019, and now for the first time,we are opening a shared studio in Bologna. I had it in my living room because it was the most direct way to learn how to use it and also the most affordable one. I am happy we will have a studio now, so we can share our space and printers with more people and try to create a community", he states. The collective he is part of started in 2020. "We funded a collective of illustrators and a small independent publishing house called Enter press. We started by doing collaborations, but now we focus on publishing other people’s work."
Marco: "I get inspired by other people’s work of any kind, not just comic book artists, by things I read and I also try to draw a lot from my own experiences. On the other hand I also spend a lot of time just drawing for fun or commission jobs where storytelling is not relevant and I can focus more on the formal aspect of it."
From cutter to illustrator
For John, being an illustrator was not always an easy job. "After I graduated I felt more and more out of touch with illustration and for a long time I didn't do anything with it. I worked in an office for 22 years as a 'press cutter' and later as a manager. I had shifts of seven nights in a row and then seven days off. In these weeks I started to draw again. I started illustrating in notebooks, drawing anything that came into my head", he says. "Such as half-remembered films and tv shows from my youth. This was still pre-internet so you couldn’t reference things. It was all through hazy memory. I used the images in my scrapbook as inspiration too. I would start copying a photograph and it would evolve into something as I drew."
Inspiration from the past
The inspiration for his spread in Wobby #31 comes from that time as well. "In the original I made back then, I had put a drawing tutor who was ‘Nancy' from the 1970s US TV show ‘Paint Along With Nancy’ and all the art students were actually renowned artists", he states. "When I saw the commission from Wobby I'd been reading a book about David Hockney’s lockdown in France and was inspired by his work ethic. It reminded me of the old drawing and so I decided to re-do it, even though I was working from memory since I couldn’t locate the early version."
Wobby #31 – Good job👍 and the signed & limited edition art print are now available in our webshop.