Mike Royer
Mike Royer
Michael W. "Mike" Royer is an comic book artist and inker, best known for his work with pencilers Russ Manning and Jack Kirby. In later life Royer became a freelance product designer and character artist for The Walt Disney Company...
jobs editors want
If you ever go to talk to an editor you don't want to be able to turn down a job because you can't do what is necessary.
art book bridges
I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement.
jobs credit months
I assisted with Russ [Manning] for about eleven months and my day job for 5 days a week was credit manager and paint salesman for Sherwin-Williams.
new-york artist years
I sometimes look at the careers of other... I guess I could call them contemporaries or maybe close artists; you know, the 4 or 5 guys who go to New York City and get a loft and work together and use each other as models and that sort of thing and wait for years and years to get married. Maybe I just wasn't that definite.
art school paris
It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.
art morning coffee
Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.
art mean thinking
When you talk about state of the art, that doesn't mean a damn thing. Think about it. State of the art. "This is the state of the art brush from Winsor-Newton." Yeah, but the state of the art sucks rubber donkey lungs.
ideas wife forty
Forty percent of my ideas came from my wife.
jobs firsts dependability
I learned that, "Mike, you get your first job on your ability and every job after that on your dependability."
drinking past nuts
I live in the past when it comes to movies, but my own career is a matter of remembering the nuts and bolts and things like eating chocolate cake and drinking milk with Jack [Kirby] in his kitchen, but that's all I remember.
voice phones evening
During the Mavelmania days in the late '60's I got a phone call one evening and I answered it and this voice said, "Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Word is you're a pretty good inker." That's how it started.
mean people kind
People ask me who my favorite inker is and I tell them my favorite inker was Joe Sinnott...but I was the best. Now I don't mean that as any kind of egotistical thing. It's just that I did what Jack wanted.
dc-comics proud fabulous
I will say that I'm proud of my connection to DC comics because they are absolutely fabulous in sending reprint royalty checks.
nice men imagination
I chose Bagdasarian Productions when I heard from some colleagues at work who were buying story boards at the time back in the early '90. I met the man once when I came in with the first half of the story board and the only thing he said when looking at the first half of the board was, "It's so nice to see someone using their imagination."