This interview comes from a great little magazine called Musings from Steven Tice, who also did the interview in this special Magic the Gathering issue. Take it away, Steveo!

Ken Meyer, Jr. has worked in comics and illustration for several years. Magic players know him primarily for his Ice Age cards and the Ernham Djinn. This interview was conducted by phone in July, 1996.

Steven Tice: Which Magic cards are you most proud of?

Ken Meyer, Jr.: Well, I just did a whole bunch of cards for The Sabbat, the new Vampire expansion that Wizards is doing, and there's a bunch of cards in it that turned out really good. if you want an existing card that's already out, there are a couple of Vampire cards...Helena Casimir. And Ernham Djinn (for Magic) turned out really good. That was one that I didn't really use any models for, so for something like that it turned out pretty good, too.

ST: For something like Kird Ape, it looks like you used a photographÑ

KM: Oh, yeah. I went through some National Geographics. I think I actually had someone once tell me they found that exact photograph. (laughter])

ST: Which Magic cards are you least proud of, that didn't quite tum out right?

KM: Well, it's funny, because one that I remember not thinking was that great is Snow Devil in Ice Age. And Formation, that's also in Ice Age. I didn't like them that much, but I've actually had some people tell me that those two they liked a lot. So you never know what people are going to iike.

ST: I think Clairvoyance is one of your best from Ice Age.

KM: Thanks. Yeah, that's also one that people have pointed out that they liked. And the bad thing is that I can't sell the original, because part of it was watercolor, but the woman's face in that was done on the computer, so there's no real original to speak of.

ST: That's interesting!

KM: Yeah, I've done a few cards on the computer, but only one is out there now, Clairvoyance. I think there's two in The Sabbat series that are done on the computer.

ST: It seemed to me that your Ice Age cards were in some ways more adventurous then your
Arabian Nights cards...

KM: That's interesting. I don't know if I would put it that way. It's kind of hard to gauge. Arabian Nights was the first gaming art for card games that I had ever done, and I had no idea what Wizards of
the Coast was. I even spelled the name wrong, I was so clueless about all that stuff back then. It might be because there were more Ice Age cards than there were Arabian Nights, and the subject matter might have been a little out there, too.

ST: Which Magic card posed the greatest artistic challenge to render?

KM: (pause) I think the Arabian Nights ones. Except for Kird Ape and Abu Ja'Far, they were all out of my head. So they were probably the hardest ones because I didn't really have any opportunity to use a model and to experiment with lighting and stuff like that, which is what I usually like to do. (You see that on the Vampire cards, they're all really realistic, and the lighting's all horror film lighting. That's fun to do). So I think, for that reason, the Arabian Nights were the hardest. Ernham Djinn was relatively difficult and Guardian Beast-Guardian Beast wasn't difficult, really, but it was one that I had to more or less make up, so it sort of comes off, from my eyes, almost looking like a painted cartoon, as opposed to a realistic thing. Whereas someone just looking at it as an illustration probably wouldn't think that, because they don't know what goes into it.

ST: How does doing card game artwork differ from other projects you've worked on?

KM: Well, the most obvious difference is the size of the original, of course, because it's reproduced so small. Some of the originals I've done for some card games are as small as four or five inches square. They're usually bigger than that, maybe nine inches tall by seven inches wide, or something like that. So they're different in that way. They're also a little simpler, because most of the ones that I've done have been portrait cards. So I find someone I think fits the character, take some photographic reference, and paint from that. And (when] they have backgrounds, more often than not they're hazy, watercolor-effects backgrounds, which are pretty easy to pull off. Conversely, ones like Thermokarst, Word of Blasting, and Mystic Remora are things that aren't out of my head, so l have to find references on places. So they can be a little bit more difficult.

ST: What would you say are your strengths and weaknesses as an artist?

KM: Well, I would say my strengths are...within the comics field, I do pretty good layouts, and my pencils are all right, but my inks aren't that strong. As far as the gaming world, I'd say that in general I can capture likenesses really well, and I can usually set a mood pretty well. That's partly because I use models and lighting and stuff to set it up ahead of time. Conversely, I don't draw out of my head as well as I should. I've come to rely on photographs too much lately, I think, and I'm trying to do more stuff out of my head. But it's difficult once you fall into that trap of using photographs a lot, it's very easy to just do that. So I need to try to do a bit less of that.

ST: How do you go about creating a Magic card? What are the steps for that?

KM: Sometimes they'll give me a pretty detailed description. In the case of the Vampire cards, (the description) will usually have a name, and the sex of the character, and maybe the clan that they belong to, though that doesn't necessarily mean much to me. Most of the time their descriptions are pretty small because they want the artist to have as much free reign as possible. So I'll get that information from them. Then, in the case of the really realistic ones, I'll think of a model I used before. Or I might ask friends if they have friends that like doing this sort of thing. Then I take a bunch of photographs, and either match the character to the photographs that I've already shot, or ahead of time I'll know what a character's supposed to look like and I'll ask the person to bring some clothing or jewelry or whatever that they think would be interesting, and use that. I shoot the photographs with the lighting that I want. Then I just use that as the basis for the painting, and pencil it out. Sometimes I'll change things, add things or subtract things, or change the composition somewhat. (Finally, I) do the penciling and the painting. I use watercolors for most of my work.

ST: What if it's something like Aurochs from Ice AgeÑ

KM: (laughs) Yeah!

ST: -where it's this ancient animal...

KM: Yeah, stuff like that is a little more difficult. What I actually did in that case, if I remember right, is that I knew the general type of animal that it was. It was sort of like a water buffalo, and I looked through a bunch of magazines (National Geographics and stuff like that). And I actually found an animal that was pretty close. What I did, if I remember right, was change a water buffalo of some type, or a buffalo. I made the hair longer, changed the horn a little bit, and I might have changed the coloring somewhat.

ST: In a recent issue of National Geographic, they had an artist's rendition of an aurochs..

KM: Really? When they told me the name of this beast an what it was, I didn't even know it was a real thing. I don't even know if they told me if it was real creature.

ST: Yeah, I didn't know either until I saw it in National Geographic!

KM: I think that they might have told me it was a real thing and I went and looked in books and tried to find some kind of a idea of what it really looked like but I never could really find anything. Sometimes you just have to hope that what you're doing is going to be what it actually is, and hope that nobody can find a reference that proves you wrong. (laughter)

ST: I imagine Thermokarst was another interesting one to try to conceptualize?

KM: Yeah. If I remember right, Thermokarst is a kind of granite that's found in caves. In my files I actually had a bunch of photographs of caves, and I found one that I thought was kind of neat. Then I wanted to have some kind of people in there, so I put those...somebody actually thought that was the Predator or something, that figure in there, but it was just supposed to be sort of a Neanderthal man.

ST: It definitely adds power to the picture.

KM: Yeah, I think that one turned out all right.

ST: What artwork were you inspired by?

KM: Well, I've always read comics, since I was a kid. That's actually how I leamed to draw. I used to copy comics with carbon paper. Then, later, I would copy the comic as it sat beside the paper I was drawing on. So I learned some from comics. I was also into people like Michelangelo, and El Greco, and painters iike that, the Italian Renaissance painters. And then, as I got older, I got more heavily into contemporary illustration. So I'd look at people like Bob Peak, who's a pretty common (influence]) among comic illustrators. Bernie Fuchs, Jim Sharpe, a lot of commercial illustrators like that. And the other people I got into later, like Gustav Klimt, I like him a lot. Then, as the comics of the seventies came along and people came into it like Barry (now Windsor-) Smith and Berni(e) Wrightson, and Jim Starlin. I was really into all of those guys. And then later, after that, people like Dave McKean, Bill Sienkiewicz, and J Muth. I've also liked comics artists who have always been really great layout people. Dave Sim's really great at that, Steve Rude...Frank Milier ofcourse is one of the best at it, Howard Chaykin. I would really study people like that for the layouts. And, in fact, I just met Marc Hempel at a convention recently, and I told him that I remember buying the Breathtaker series and really studying that, because the layouts just seemed to be so great in that, I really studied them a lot.

ST: I've been following the series that you and Warren Ellis are doing in Calibrations...

KM:(laughter) Well, that's interesting. I wondered if anybody was seeing that!

ST: I find that to be a very intringuing series.

KM: Well, good. I'm really hoping that people pick up on the writing, because Warren wanted the artwork to be really static. The layout is really static, just three panels on top of three panels almost all the time, and a lot of repeated images. It's not like there's a lot of wacky layouts or anything in it.

ST: Oh, but it is of course all very well-rendered, and Dave Gibbons has shown us all that you can accomplish a lot within an artificial limitation like that Look at the nine-panel grid in Watchmen.

KM: Yeah, every once in a while I'll look at someone like that. Someone who can function within a real rigid format, but you never got the idea that it was boring because they did so much within each panel. I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near that good, I'm just hoping that people don't get bored with the artwork!

ST: What other comics material have you done?

KM: Well, recently a lot of it has been for Caliber. I've done a few Marvel things here and there, but mostly it's been this series called Kilroy is Here for Caliber. I did the interiors and covers for #0-3 and #5, and I've done the covers for all of the issues except for #1. I've done covers for other Caliber books. I've also done stories in Negative Burn. I have a little autobiographical series of my own called "Project High." It comes out kind of sporadically, and talks about my high school years in Georgia in the seventies, with integration. So that comes and goes. And there've been a few Marvel things, a few painted things. There was a painted Ghost Rider story in Midnight Sons Unlimited #4, I think. And I've actually helped out a few people on deadlines, twice now: a couple of pages in Amazing Fantasy #17 and a couple of pages of Inner Demons. And there have been other things along the way. One of the first things I ever did was an Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters spinoff. It was a two issue mini-series called Clint the Hamster Triumphant. It was a lot of fun. Don Chin did some of the writing (and he let me add a lot of stuff), and Mike Dringenberg inked it. I did the covers. I tried to do movie parodies on the covers. It was a lot of fun to do. So there have been a lot of weird little things along the way.

ST: what new projects are you working on in comics and cards?

KM: Well, there's The Sabbat that I mentioned. I don't think it's been announced when that's coming out yet. I think I have about twenty-one cards in that. Then there's "Atmospherics." There's something that's going to be started sometime soon with Malcolm Bourne. He's the writer. It's based on one of my paintings. It's called "Gustav , P.l." It's about a vampire who worked with Gustav Klimt back when he was alive, and is a vampire now in modem times, but he keeps it under wraps. He's a private investigator. We don't know exactly when we're going to get started on it. Malcolm's already written a lot of it, but I haven't been able to decide when I'm going to start it. It will be for NBM. It's going to be a graphic novel released in iate 1997.

ST: Is there anything else you're working on nght now?

KM: Actually, I just remembered something. It's sitting on my table right now. It's a couple of cards for a Clive Barker game based on one of his series called Imajica. I can't remember what other artists are doing it, there are a lot of good artists who are doing cards on it. I have four cards that I'm doing for that game. There's also a couple of cards in the game that Susan Van Camp put together, Dragon Storm.

ST: Is there anything else you'd like to say about your job as an artist?

KM: As far as comic books go, definitely check out things that aren't Marvel or DC or Image, or even, say, Dark Horse. There are so many self-published comics out there that are really good. I mean, more people are becoming aware of this sure, but there's still a lot more out there that is really interesting that you just have to work to find Check out more alternative stuff.