Why Even Though My Comics Can Be Called Manga, I Prefer to Draw Indie Black and White Comics....

I'm talking Slave Labor Graphics, Dark Horse Comics, and Oni Press. Old School Indie, Hellboy, Sin City, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Usagi Yojimbo, Cerebus, Bone, Scud, and Johnny The Homicidal Maniac. I didn't grow up on Manga when I was 16 and 17. That would happen later. I started off growing up on a diet of Black and White indie comics that were not in the mainstream of media at the time and had no movie or TV adaptations in the beginning. Just stuff that inspired me and my creativity and put me in awe. Indie comics of the 90s and early 2000s had a heavy influence on the actual design and look of my End Times series.

The Heavy Usage of Black and Silhouettes and Japanese Notan design. 

And the grittiness and rawness of the artwork, how you could still see the draftsmanship and inking mistakes and the sloppiness of the artist's neurotic auteur hand on almost every panel and still loved every page of every book these guys did, despite all that. 

That was the Good Shit. The way many teenagers grow up on manga, I grew up on black and white pen and ink comic books (floppy comic with glossy painted covers and gritty artwork.