Artist Greg Horn finds bigger checks in the male
Once known for his female characters, Horn was able to switch thanks to Wizard
THOUGH Greg Horn has been a fixture at Wizard World Philly for years now, the one constant is that Horn remains one of the rare artists whose art on the cover alone moves comics off shelves.
So much else has changed, though, in the industry and for Horn personally.
"There's a lot more business to comics than I thought there was when I was a fan," he said. "You'd come in here and draw and if you drew the best, everything [was] going to go your way.
"There's a lot of politics. There's a lot of logistics. A lot of diplomacy. High stakes, man. You'd be surprised. Sometimes you think you're in an episode of 'Game of Thrones.' "
Back in 2005, Horn said, the highlight of his career was doing a colossal painting of the 2004 U.S. Olympic Basketball Team.
"It's probably the most high-profile piece of art I've done, [and] been seen by more people than any of my other paintings," he said.
"But now, in 2015, I would say the book that is high on my list is the Amazing Spider-Man No. 1 variant cover I did that was published last year. That really got me on the map with these new GameStop covers and also caught the attention of Stan Lee!
"As a result we did a promotion together where he drew head sketches on the comic books right next to the sketches I drew! So it's a comic with my drawing and Stan's drawing on the cover.
"Those and my other comics for GameStop are among the highest auctioning books of all time for modern books and have gained a lot of notoriety."
Perhaps the biggest change, however, is that Horn is now known for a much broader range of work than just drawing voluptuous women.
"Early in my career, I did Scarlet Witch covers, Emma Frost covers, I found that doing all of these [female] characters kind of got me pigeonholed and I was never really asked to do any of Marvel's male characters and that was a problem," Horn said. "Because if you go down the list of Marvel's most popular characters, I'll bet you 1 to 20 are male characters.
"You really want to be known as the guy that can draw the male characters well. The problem with 'good girl' artists, which is the term for artists that specialize in female characters, is that most of them do not draw very good male characters."
That was Horn's quandary. Until (the now defunct) Wizard magazine saved him.
"The whole reason anybody can even know I draw male characters is because of Wizard," he said. "They hired me to draw female characters [and] they were picking up heat for it, so then they asked me to draw only male characters.
"I did about 12 or 15 covers over an eight-year period and it is that association, where I drew almost all male characters, that finally [had it] catching on that I could do that also.
"So, right now, I would say I'm a little bit better known for drawing male characters," Horn said. "Everything I'm working on is for one of Marvel's top-of-the-line books: Amazing Spider-Man, Death of Wolverine, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America and Star Wars."
As for this weekend, Horn says he will eschew panels for the opportunity to talk to his fans one-on-one at his booth.
"I'm actually very congenial at my table and have more substantial discussions, in quality and quantity," he said.