Kyle Baker: The Care of the Future is Mine
Kyle Baker believes that a new era of entertainment is possible. One where people create the best cartoons ever, and the talented folks that create them will be fairly compensated. He’s done it alone before and he’s going to do it again with whoever wants to follow. We suggest you watch his space.
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ABOUT Kyle Baker
Kyle Baker is an American cartoonist, comic book writer-artist, and animator known for his graphic novels and for a 2000′s revival of the series ‘Plastic Man’. He’s been awarded the ‘Harvey Award’ (after Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD magazine) and the Eisner Award (named for Will Eisner, creator of the Graphic Novel). They’re considered to be the comic book industry’s highest honours.
He has a bunch of works in the bag for notable clients such as: Disney, Warner Brothers Feature Animation, HBO Dreamworks, The Cartoon Network, Marvel Comics, DC COMICS, Saatchi & Saatchi, Watson-Guptill, RCA/BMG, Random House, Nickelodeon Magazine, Rugrats, Scholastic Goosebumps and others.
Growing up he loved the ‘funnies’ and loved to draw Johnny Hart’s B.C. characters and the Muppets. He made up his own cartoon characters and drew stories about them. He’d come home from the movies and practice drawing the characters. He drew animated flip books on index cards and when he was 11, he had a Super-8 movie camera and made animated cartoons.
In Junior High School, he drew comic books and photocopied them at his father’s office. He sold them for five cents each. In his Senior year of High School, Kyle became an intern at Marvel Comics making photocopies and filing fan mail. He became background assistant to Marvel inker Josef Rubinstein, and later also assisted Vince Colletta and Andy Mushynski. Marvel artists Walt Simonson, Al Milgrom and Larry Hama and writer and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter as provided him with art and storytelling advice.
Around 1990 he began scripting comics. Nine years later he was quoted as saying, “I wrote short gags, like the kind you see in the newspapers and Cowboy Wally, but not stories. I only learned to write stories because people kept paying me to write them. In the years 1991-1994, 90 percent of his income was derived from writing. He figured he should learn to write.”
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