"The work is profoundly different" says the artist behind HBO's The Last of Us Season 2 poster campaign

I grew up in Houston, Texas, which does boast some deep-welled art resources: it’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, the Rothko Chapel and the insane Menil Collection, which houses, I think, the largest collection of Rene Magritte’s artwork this side of the Atlantic. But the culture is anything but art, or at least it was in the '70s and '80s that I was there for.

There was an underground group of people scattered around the city that weren’t as obsessive about football and church, but it took me until high school to really find it, so I was largely left alone to sort out my art life. My mum helped a little in supporting it with art classes here and there, but it wasn’t until she made me apply and then get into a high school for performing and visual arts that I felt like I found my people and a way out of Texas to the more artful New York City after graduation, and on from there.

I think movies, TV and books dominated my art seeking back then. There really wasn’t much else to chase after given the culture in Houston, and the storytelling aspect of those mediums really shaped me hugely, and led me into comics and books, and now working in film and TV as an artist.

I think in some ways the lack of support and community for an art life down there was a bit of a book for teaching me to stand on my own, and carve my own path as an artist; there simply was no other choice. Sometimes the negative is what defines the positive.

Well I don’t know if it was just one painting. I recall having my hair blown back when the Menil hosted some Francis Bacon paintings. Pretty much lived at that place, just down the road from my high school, and would spend hours with the Magrittes.

Ad Reinhardt was another revelation I found there, plus Alice Neel, Sue Coe and Joseph Beuys when I worked at the Contemporary Arts Museum too. Man I loved those exhibits and remember how much I loved being there alone with that work. It was poorly attended, which wasn’t great for the museum but was a gift to me personally. I had a very private and intense creative education in that way, steered by what caught me above all, and anything remotely narrative was especially grabbing.

I don’t have a distinctive memory of my first paying gig to be honest. I’m lacking the framed dollar bill memoriam of that moment to seal it into history. Likely I was just happy to get paid for work at all, as any of us are when we’re starting out.

I expect it was after college when I was working as a home repair monkey in Brooklyn and drawing comics at night. I did my first graphic novel Sudden Gravity that way, but it doesn’t count as I wasn't paid a penny for that.

Maybe it was The Matrix Comics back in the late '90s? I got brought in as a Johnny-on-the-spot when one of their slotted artists vanished on them, and I had to write, paint and letter a full eight-page story in about four days. I think that’s what really turned my corner in a lot of ways. It gave me a taste for the thrill of the deadline crunch and I ended up doing a lot of work for them after as a result, which I was paid for at last. It sort of began my career as the emergency deadline saviour, which I still employ as a method even after all these years.

A lot of my work is under NDA right now so it’s a tricky one to answer. Let’s call it the trio of portraits HBO commissioned me to do for The Last of Us Season 2 campaign.

The work is profoundly different to the art I was doing early on. While I did work a lot in black and white, I was pushing hard on the full-colour front just to expand my scope of work wherever possible.

When you’re starting out you want to cast as wide a net as you can, and say yes to all the things that come in until you can grow a firmer grip on your steering wheel and direct your path more later.

But the black and white work has remained a constant and an approach that I’ve championed ever since those first published pieces, and being in a position to codify that in a major global campaign in this way was a real moment for me personally. To have art that is seen by most as unfinished until it's coloured become the feature was an important flag to plant so others coming up, fellow weirdos trapped in non-artful upbringings, might see hope in this kind of thing. It felt especially significant.

The landscape has changed dramatically since the 90s when I was coming up, for good and ill of course, but I think more for the better overall. The internet’s opened up a lot of new avenues to make a living, and connect with peers, clients and collectors that just wasn't available without the gatekeepers nod of approval before.

And while I did largely focus on comics for the first 20 or so years, almost exclusively, I wasn’t really a superhero guy and neither was I really in line with the New York alternative comics scene that I was immersed in back then.

If it wasn’t for the years of support of my manager Allen Spiegel, I don’t know what or how I would have done anything. He really taught me how to navigate it all, wrestle with contracts, handle crappy clients and deadlines, and the conflicts that come up in any kind of work you do. My ability to work solely as a creative artist and writer all these years is a credit to his guidance and support, and getting to be part of this crew alongside the giants that inspired me in the first place – DaveMcKean, Kent Williams, Jon J.Muth, George Pratt and so on – showed me a peek ahead of how to make it work.

I think it would be the same ethic that Spiegel taught me as I was learning the ropes: always be willing to work harder and longer than the other person; never ever hack out a project – whatever job you agree to do, however small or low budget, always give it the same attention, passion and energy as you might bestow on some big opportunity or high profile job; and a job is about the work, a career is about people. Always follow people and not companies, and create and nurture relationships that are lasting and positive.

Even if your gig is a crisis gig for reasons having nothing to do with you personally, to be able to holdfast and still stick the landing while remaining professional endears you to clients in ways you can never really quantify, but it makes or breaks careers alone.

No one in this work I know who has a career now, even after all these years, got here from anything less than a stubborn, obsessive drive to never stop working. Hard work and relentless persistence outpaces raw talent in every way, always.

I think there’s a lot more agency in the artist’s hands than there has ever been before. We don’t have to court relationships that we don't have yet as the sole means of gaining access to a career like you once did. It’s what made my Covid years twice as busy with work, what has allowed me to live, raise a family and work consistently while living in a rural town 30 minutes deep into the forests outside Northampton, Massachusetts.

The advent of social media has been one of the most altering things to ever hit our field and I’m glad I was both young enough to grip it and old enough to temper it’s use as an artist, because it’s definitely a knife that can cut both ways. But knowing for a fact how hard it was to get in back when it was high walls and gatekeepers everywhere, I’m grateful for the opportunities and abilities it has provided.

A lot of us, especially the troglodyte profiles inherent to making comics, have a hard time with the schmoozing and courting elite power brokers that used to be required to get in. Being in New York City, near all the publishers and art scene there, was essential in a way it isn’t any more. Now anyone with a connection can get spotted by an editor or art director from anywhere in the country. Just ask Jeff Kinney and a dozen or more other authors and creatives able to carve a path in our field thanks to this new technology.

That’s weirdly tricky. I think as a rule I try to make sure to identify with any character I’ve worked on, whether it’s a music video for Prince, characters from a film I adore like Kim from Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Naiches and Goyakhla from Indeh with Ethan Hawke, Conan the Barbarian for Dark Horsewith Kurt Busiek, or getting to work on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

My own characters tend to be the ones I connect with the most personally; Walt from The Lost Boy especially, Jack and Cooper from Meadowlark, and in a lot of ways all three of my main characters in the novel I’m working on now. If you're doing it right there’s bits of your identity in each of the characters you work with, create or sculpt.