Post by Xavier on Mar 29, 2005 23:21:18 GMT 1
Xavier : Ciao Cammo! Can you please present yourself for the people who would not know you yet :
Cammo : Hi everybody, my name’s Giuseppe Camuncoli, AKA Cammo, and I was born in Italy on the 2nd of March 1975. I always loved drawing, since I was a little kid. Everybody was telling me that I would’ve ended up one day doing comics as a job, but I was too young to believe that something like that was possible. I read tons of comics when I was a kid, some Disney, some italian comics, a lot of Marvel Comics, and people like Jack Kirby, John Romita, John Byrne were legendary, I thought they were gods, so how could somebody like me, living in a small town in Italy, manage to work in comics as an adult? Impossible. But I kept on drawing, because it was natural to me. And a passion.
Then, when I was 15, my father found this small comic class in the nearer big town, Reggio Emilia, which is close to Bologna. It was 3-4 months, evening classes, but it covered almost everything, from scripts to anatomy, black and white, storytelling and so on. Almost everything I learned was something I had learned on my own, as a self-taught artist, but our teachers were professionals, and more than that, this gave me the opportunity to meet other aspiring artists and writers, and it made me feel I was not the only person I knew that loved comics. So I met Matteo Casali, a writer with whom I started working with on several projects. We started going to conventions in Italy, of course we were very young and almost everybody didn’t want to give us a chance and publish our stories, especially because they were
very American-like.
So one day, in 1996, we decided to self-publish our first comic book, that got printed thru our label, Innocent Victim, in 1997. This first published comic book was BONEREST, that now is printed in 4 different countries, USA included since Image Comics is starting to publish it in America this summer.
Then, in 1998, we went for the first time to the San Diego comic convention to show our book. To make a long story short, in 2000, then-Vertigo editor Heidi Mac Donald asked me to work on a Swamp Thing fill-in, and from then on I have worked for the American market on such titles as Hellblazer, Batgirl, Spider-Man’s Tangled Web, Vertigo Pop: Bangkok and, of course, The Intimates.
Gabriele Dell'otto, Sergio Toppi, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Jim Lee at the Essen (Germany) comics convention in 2004
Xavier : You seems to be very close to Gabriele. What is he for you : best friend or like a brother?
Cammo : I met Gabriele maybe five years ago, in various conventions, and he always seemed to me like a very nice guy. Then we finally had the opportunity of being invited by the same publisher, namely Panini Comics, and we became really good friends. He could never be my brother or best friend because he’s a fan of the Rome football team, while I’m for Juventus, but he’s really close... Nobody’s perfect!
Del Piero Bone sketch by Gabriele for Cammo
Xavier : What do you think you would have done if not working in comics field?[/I]
Cammo : I dunno, I can tell you that I’m still attending University even though I don’t have the time anymore to study. One day I’ll finish it and I’ll have a degree on Italian literature, and maybe I could teach in schools, that was my purpose when I finished High School. But quite honestly, if I should stop working in comics, I would love to work as a clerk in a shoe shop. I have a fetish for women’s boots, so that would be heaven to me... I only would have to ask my girlfriend if it’s ok...
Xavier : Cammo, can you tell us what is your typical day at work please?
Cammo : There almost isn’t a typical day for me... Sometimes I wake up early, sometimes late, sometimes I do most of the pencils in the afternoon and some other times at night, sometimes I work on the train and sometimes even during conventions. But what happens more often is this: I wake up around ten, then I have breakfast, I take a shower, I read the newspapers and then I start working, sometimes at home and sometimes at the studio. Then I usually don’t stop at least until 2-3 at night, but I have breaks in between a page and another. Even if I’m not working, I usually never go to bed before 2 AM. When I have a deadline, I can wake up at 8,30 – 9,00 AM and sleep only 5-6 hours.
Xavier : How do you work when you have an inker (like for The Intimates) and when you don't have any?[/I]
Cammo : Recently, I’ve always worked with inkers. I always do very tight pencils, so that the inkers cannot go wrong with what I do. I start with a blue pencil and then I finish with regular pencils. Sometimes, though, I do work without inkers, maybe on some illustrations or covers. In this case, I just draw a very loose page with the blue pencil, and then start inking, sometimes with pens, sometimes with a quill.
Wolverine sketch by Cammo
Xavier : Which material do you use for penciling?
Cammo : Apart from what I said before, when I have to do colorwork, I always use a quill to ink, and then ecolines, brushes and colored pencils or whiteout to put the colors on the page. The paper I use is most of the times the regular boards that DC or Marvel sends me, always rough.
Machine Man by Cammo
Xavier : I was very surprised when 1st saw you sketching in Angouleme, how you were working (no layouts and direct lines). How did come to work like this?[/I]
Cammo : Well, that’s something that came with practice. I was doing sketches like everybody else, first with pencils and then with inks, but after a short time, I realized that it was double the work for me, since most of the lines I was drawing with the pencil were correct. So I started trying to skip the pencilling process and go direclty with inks, and it worked. Sometimes I fuck up, though, and that’s when I decided to use the brushpen and add some color: it always helps covering the possible mistakes.