Showing posts with label Gene Ha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gene Ha. Show all posts
Jul 6, 2025
Nov 18, 2023
Moore 70: Happy birthday, Magus!
| Cover art by Carlos Dearmas. Colours by Luca Paciolus. |
Upon request from the friends at Fumo di China (which is a long-standing Italian magazine fully focused on Comic Art), I put together a 6-page special to celebrate the great event. With a gorgeous cover art by Carlos Dearmas & colours by Luca Paciolus.
The special contains a 4-page article that I wrote titled "Parole da Moore" (Words by Moore) with Moore portraits by Gene Ha, Angelo Secci, Leomacs, Lorenzo Mò, Giacomo Putzu and Officina Infernale. Furthermore, the special includes a brief Moore profile, selected excepts from the famous Sassaki's interview and 7 opinions about Moore from his peers and friends.
All in Italian, of course. Scusate. Sorry.
Special thanks to Carlos, Luca, Gene, Angelo, Massimiliano, Lorenzo, Giacomo, Andrea and Raphael for their collaboration and permission.
The magazine (Fumo di China n. 335) will be available next week in all the Italian news-stands & comic shops (of good taste).
Again... Auguri, Alan! A chent'annos. Have a great day!
(And maybe there is something moore to come...)
Sep 16, 2023
Feb 25, 2023
The story behind Top 10
Excerpts from an interview conducted by David Harper with Top 10's artists Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. You can read it HERE.
[...] I sat down with both Ha and Cannon to discuss the story behind Top 10 from their perspective, and how the two worked with Moore to craft this remarkable series.
[...] “By the end of the first issue and a little after the beginning of the second, it became totally clear to us that Zander’s insanely good and fast at layouts, storytelling, reading the script, interpreting it, and figuring out nuances I wouldn’t see,” Ha shared. “And for consistency of style, anatomy, perspective, backgrounds, and stuff like that, I can do things that Zander can’t do.”
[...] “Zander was able to figure out the storytelling build of Alan Moore, and then figure out a Zander Cannon way of telling the story more efficiently sometimes.”
“The nice thing about (Top 10) was it wasn’t this spare, tense drama. It was just a fire hose of junk out on the page,” Cannon added. “If you had to course correct a little bit to fix a problem or whatever, it was no big deal.
“It was part of the vibe.”
[...] “His scripts are very detailed. He obviously has that vision in his head of the camera as a character moving in and out of conversations,” Cannon said. “And he was attempting something that was so complex. In this case it was…I wouldn’t say new to comics, but the idea was that we were specifically trying to emulate something that is done in film and doing it in comics.”
[...] “I’d say that two thirds of the background characters in the first issue were in Alan’s script, and by the end, one third were,” Ha said. “The trick is that he would sometimes just give a theme for characters in the story or in a scene, but then he wouldn’t list any examples.”
[...] If there’s one issue that Top 10 is famous for, it’s #8. [...] The incredible thing about this issue is it at least in part only happened because Alan Moore got sick shortly before pages were due to the artists. [...]
“What happened is, Alan had gotten the flu or something like it, and he was too sick to write the whole script or to figure out the plot of that issue,” Ha noted. “So, he wrote two pages to slow us down long enough so he could recover from the flu and then figure out what the story was.”
“(The second page) is just a one point perspective down shot of this entire city that took Gene an absolute age to draw. And that was on purpose because Alan had the flu and he was like, ‘I have to give Gene and Zander something to get them off my back,’” Cannon shared. “So, he wrote these two pages that were intentionally a huge pain in the ass to draw. That was why the story ended up focusing on (Peregrine).”
“I think the reason the story is so tight is that it starts and ends on her and her crisis of faith. That’s a great example of just playing the cards you’re dealt, being able to pivot, and then making a meaningful story out of it. Which I thought was remarkable.”
“He left himself little bits and pieces that he could play with later, but he didn’t know what he was going to do with it,” Ha added.
“And then, it turned out to be the greatest issue of Top 10 ever.”[...]
Dec 26, 2020
Moore, Glycon and Smax by Gene Ha
| Art by Gene Ha. |
Above, a fantastic marker sketch of our beloved Man from Northampton drawn by Master comic book artist and illustrator GENE HA.
I love Gene Ha comics and drawing style since the 90ies so it's a real pleasure and honour for me to receive such a beautiful piece of art.
But Ha is a generous extraordinary man, so he also added an extra sketch of Top Ten's Smax drawn on the opening page of his amazing art book Oddities and Apocrypha from the files of Gene Ha (highly recommended! Get a copy here!). WOW!
| Art by Gene Ha. |
Feb 15, 2020
Jul 14, 2019
UltraMice by Gene Ha
| Art by GENE HA. |
Above, an awesome copic sketch by GENE HA featuring three UltraMice and the Ultimate Pacifier from Top 10, the series created by Moore, Zander Cannon and Ha.
Ha wrote on his Facebook page: "The mice were never given names in the comics. In my original art side notes, RR was always Risky Rodent. I'm calling the other two Captain Atomik (that's #kimota, backwards :)) and Captain Mooncheese."
Ha wrote on his Facebook page: "The mice were never given names in the comics. In my original art side notes, RR was always Risky Rodent. I'm calling the other two Captain Atomik (that's #kimota, backwards :)) and Captain Mooncheese."
Nov 27, 2018
Top 10 sketches by Gene Ha
| Art by Gene Ha. |
Above and below you can admire two wonderful copic marker sketch commissions of Top Ten characters (Toybox and Smax) by the incredible GENE HA done for Dutch Comic Con in Utrecht, Netherlands.
| Art by Gene Ha. |
Jun 1, 2018
Gene Ha on Alan Moore
Excerpt from an interview I did, via email, in November 2004.
Translated and printed in Italy on Vertigo Presenta n. 45 magazine (Magic Press).
Alan Moore, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon collaborated on books such as Top 10 and Top 10: The Forty-Niners.
How is not only working with but co-creating with a comics living legend such as writer Alan Moore?
Gene Ha: Intimidating. He's a bit like Gandalf, but he talks like a British plumber instead of a British professor. He's perfectly at ease with himself, and he makes you feel comfortable too.
He's full of wonderful stories, and he loves to hear a good stories. You really can't help but notice how good he is at understanding how to tell stories. He's always aware how any plotline will affect the story for 10 or 20 issues ahead. And something new always pops up on every page.
I'll feed him ideas, and I'm always surprised by which ones he'll use and how he'll change them. I had an idea for Superman as an alcoholic, with super-vomit. Alan took that idea, but applied it to a Japanese movie monster instead. That's how we ended up with Gograh [see picture above].
I'd love to meet him someday, but so far I've only exchanged letters and talked to him on the phone.
Jun 3, 2017
Gene Ha about Alan Moore
| Art by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. |
Excerpt from an interview with the amazing GENE HA, well-known for his work with Moore on Top Ten series.
“It’s part of Alan Moore’s theory that the imaginary realm is one giant realm. [...] They’re all connected together inside of one giant glowing world, so it had to kind of reference present day ideas and past ideas and just mash them together. If you look at any of his recent projects, it’s all about that mash-up of everything from our imagination existing at once. It’s a big theme of his.
[... ] He is literally the fastest creative mind I’ve ever worked with, and
I’ve worked with some really creative minds.” [... ] When I’m
having a conversation with him and he throws out ideas, I can’t keep up.
He’ll literally leave me in the dust.”
The complete article is available HERE.
Jun 19, 2014
Amazing Top 10 page by Gene Ha
| Page 2 from Top 10 N. 8 by Gene Ha. |
"This was the hardest single page I ever drew. Alan Moore was too sick to
write much Top 10 for me, so he wrote one page of script of Peregrine
getting ready for work while listening to the news. The second page was a
top down shot of Peregrine leaving her flying mansion, looking directly
down on all of Neopolis. Every inch of the page had to be covered with
cityscape. It took me four days working all out to get this finished. By
then he’d recovered and had to figure out the rest of the story.
It’s widely considered the finest issue of Top 10. Including by me." [Gene Ha]
It’s widely considered the finest issue of Top 10. Including by me." [Gene Ha]
May 3, 2013
Girl One lives!
| Art by Gene Ha. |
Above you can admire a great sketch of Girl One (a character from the fantastic series Top 10) recently drawn by the amazing Gene Ha during the last C2E2 event.
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