I’ve always known David López was a great artist. He’s proven it time and time again, whether it’s on superhero projects like Captain Marvel and All-New Wolverine or his Panel Syndicate series Blackhand & Ironhead. But when FML — his upcoming Dark Horse Comics series with writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, colorist Cris Peter, and letterer Clayton Cowles — was announced, I had a feeling that it would be the type of project that could prove he wasn’t just a great artist, but one of the best. And you know what?

I was right.

In FML, López delivers something truly special, as his tremendous character acting, inventiveness, and storytelling gifts are on display in each and every panel, page, and issue. López was always great, but his work on FML is astonishing enough that he’s making my 2024 pick for Artist of the Year a fierce battle. 5 This series launches on November 6th, and it’s about “a group of metal kids who face a medley of bizarre foes and encounters in Portland, Oregon during a worldwide pandemic.” But it’s about a lot more than that — it’s really an incredibly fun, energetic, and smart exploration of the emotion expressed in its title — including acting simply as a highlight reel for some of the best comic art of the year, amongst a great many other things.

Having read the first two issues, I knew I wanted to talk to López about his work on this upcoming eight-issue series. So recently through a combination of Google Docs (the first section of the interview) and Zoom (the pages we discuss), López and I did just that. In this art feature interview, we talked about his background as an artist, working with DeConnick, the appeal of this project, and more, before we discuss five pages from FML #1 and what fueled the decisions he made on each. It’s an extended chat with one of the best artists in comics about how he does what he does, and it’s absolutely delightful.

Also, before you ask, there are no spoilers here. The pages that are used are from the preview, so it’s nothing that isn’t already available. But if you’re intrigued by what you see, I highly recommend you pick FML #1 up. It’s an exceptional series, and, again, a great showcase for López’s art. You can find it below. Oh, and this interview has been edited for length and clarity. I hope you dig it.

Let’s start with the basics: Why comics? What made the medium such an appealing one to you both as a reader and as a storyteller?

David López: Comics? Comics are the best!

As a reader it wasn’t a conscious choice, I’ve always been surrounded by comics. I like the stories, and I like the art. There’s admiration in the skill of an artist that always amazes me. It’s magic. I read Asterix, Tintin and lots of classic comic books in the public library. My friend Enric shared his Amazing Spider-Man, but it was Román who got me into New Mutants and later on, X-Men (Art Adams’ Asgardian Wars). Then came Akira and…how can anybody not love comics? That’s the real question!

As a creator, it allows me to try to learn that magic of drawing and create infinite worlds populated by people with my hands. It gives me an illusion of control and lets me tell what’s in my head, release the pressure, makes me feel alive. I tried illustration for a while. I used to visit Luis Royo’s studio when I was 15 (he’s from my hometown) and learned how to use an airbrush and, obviously, I tried that kind of work, but it was too much work. More than a week to make one drawing! Are you crazy? That’s not for me.

I went back to comics and met friends who I made fanzines with. That was the beginning.

You’re from Spain, a country with an incredible history of comic art and comic artists. Did that history and the artists who live and work there play a part in how you figured out your voice as an artist? Or did you take a different path in figuring out the type of artist you wanted to be?

López: There was influence, no doubt. The context of my country when I was growing up was very exciting, there was an urge of opening and a thrill for freedom. We were coming out of a forty-year fascist, ultra catholic regime that had us closed to the world. Society longed for freedom and modernity. At that time, underground culture became mainstream and was everywhere. Many comic creators appeared on TV and the news spoke about them. I learned of Moebius and Hugo Pratt, even (Katsuhiro) Otomo, through the news! Spanish editors published the best comics from all around the globe. We were the first country out of Japan to publish Dragon Ball! I haven’t found the date, but the legend says so.

In my perception, cartoonists were like rock stars and when (Carlos) Pacheco, (Salvador) Larroca and (Pasqual) Ferry started working for the majors in the early 90s, it was an epiphany. If they could make it, so did I.

So, yes, the artists and the ambience of my youth were vital to the artist I am today.

What made you want to work in the American comics market in specific? Was it about how it fit for the type of artist you see yourself as? Was it about opportunities? What was it?

López: I’ve always loved superheroes and the floppy format. The object itself is beautiful. When I was 17, one Spanish publisher, La Cúpula, began publishing the works of Dan Clowes, Los Bros Hernández, Charles Burns, all those crazy cartoonists. It blew my mind. I started doing underground comics. Not anything hardcore, but slice of life in the vibes of Hate. I had my own fanzine, Espiral, and I collaborated in another one with Jesús Saiz, Fernando Blanco, and Javi Pina. We’re all from the same town.

A Spanish agent contacted Jesús Saiz to see if he wanted to work for the US. He said yes and it worked so Fernando, Javi and I tried the same route! Suddenly the chance of drawing X-Men was remote, not impossible. My style then wasn’t what superheroes editors were interested in, but fortunately Bobbie Chase appeared.

A comment here: at that time, I was publishing a story in La Cúpula (the publishers of Peter Bagge). It was a romantic comedy about two girls sharing an apartment in Barcelona. Well, Bobbie Chase was frustrated because she couldn’t find the perfect artist for a project at Marvel. She wanted to publish a story about two girls that share an apartment in New York City. I was perfect for it, so I got hired.

The book didn’t happen, but I was already an artist working for Marvel! I had to adapt my style a bit to fit the taste of American editors but one year after that I was published in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and after that, Fallen Angel and…and a career in comics.

You’re working with writer Kelly Sue DeConnick on FML, and she’s someone you’ve worked with before and seemingly have a great relationship with. What is it about Kelly Sue that just fits you and what you want to do in comics?

López: Kelly Sue has a contagious passion. She is very exigent in her work, and you end up doing your best to match that energy. Her comics are not just stories about the villain of the week or a crossover about a crossover. She uses all the possibilities of the genre to speak about whatever she wants. There’s always subtext. That’s something I want in my work. I want to speak about more important things.

And also, she’s the best partner. In the communication context we are in, where the writer is the star and artists are interchangeable, she always fights for her collaborators, she insists that comics are a collaborative medium and, you know, she cares.

Related to that, FML is a project that came together at the end of a long journey of experimentation between you and Kelly Sue. After all that experimentation, what made that the right project for the two of you at this point?

López: I finally managed to trick her into writing me a comic.

At this stage in her career Kelly Sue is into bigger things than comics. Comics are too much work for too little compensation. But we have the poison inside and we need to make comics. The project began because we wanted to do a comic together. Captain Marvel was a great experience, but I wanted a second round, this time with all the freedom we could find. From there we had some conversations, we wanted to speak about teenagehood. We both wanted to have a male lead for once, and with that we started trying things.

We gave fantasy a try, a community college for wizards with useless powers, but that didn’t work. After that Riley appeared, and Portland, and a riot grrrl mom, and the title, FML. The fantasy genre diluted, and we arrived to what was basically FML. But it wasn’t working, probably because it was coming from places that didn’t make sense. We restarted knowing where we wanted to go and suddenly all of it was fresh.

With FML, I’ve gone back to the first comics I was doing. Slice of life with a drop of supernatural while adding the point of view of grown-ups.

Let’s talk about some pages from FML. To start with, I’m curious as to what your process is on this series once you get a script in from Kelly Sue. Where do you start? Is it just layouts? Do you go straight to pencils? What do you do?

López: No. I do thumbnails from all the script. I print the script and put the dialogue in color so I know where things are, and then I read through it a few times to get the vibe. Fortunately, with Kelly Sue, we can talk about it, so she explains to me what she wants to do. There’s always a little paragraph at the beginning of each scene, and then we talk about it, like, “This is because of this,” etc.. And then I read it all, getting the feeling of what the story is about in that issue. I work on panels first, and then I make a little layout, like some doodles in the script.

And after that, I do the layouts of the whole book. I also put my own lettering in there. Because I am using Clip Studio, you can do that very easily. And for me, it’s impossible to work without the balloons in there. Not knowing where it’s going to be, I don’t know what room I have. And then I make my first doodles for the book and then layouts. With those layouts, Daniel Chabon 6 and Kelly Sue comment on them, and we see if if they like it or not or if they have ideas. And then I just go draw it.

It’s very organic. It’s great because it’s different from making superhero books, because in superheroes you are just one part of a big mechanism. And here, everybody that’s involved with the book…it’s all the mechanism. You have feedback and you know everything that’s involved in there, and then you just do it. It’s much easier.

In the beginning, we had Riley playing emotionlessly, looking at the reader while everything was on fire. But it didn’t work. And since I’m an artist, I can see what’s in the script before I draw it, but people that aren’t used to that need to have it drawn. So once Kelly Sue saw what it looked like, she said, “Maybe we should do it different.” We have the chance to do that in the layouts. In the layouts, I also put the spot blacks and some gray work, and then I’ll be in contact with the colorist.

On this page…well, we changed Riley. We had lots of trouble making those skulls in the front because at the beginning, we didn’t clearly know what we wanted for Riley’s art style. One of the hardest things was trying to find a style for a kid that’s 17 years old and likes art, because he has to be proficient enough to do whatever he wants to do with his art but still not mature. And also, he’s a metalhead guy. You have to do lots of work to make it work. And fortunately, it worked, finally.

So, you run the layouts by Kelly Sue and Daniel Chabon before finalizing the pages?

López: We have video meetings where we revise it. Everybody checks it and everybody has their say. There are panels that have changed four or five times because…mostly Kelly Sue. (laughs) She has a clear idea of what she wants in the expressions of the mother. Like, “No, she’s more worried about the kid, but she’s angry.” So, you have to work things out.

I’ve been working in American comics since 2000. And for me, having the chance to do stuff real-time, like, “Hey, look at this. I have changed this,” and “No, I want something more,” and then you just get something live, and the writer and the editor are at the other end of the line and they see it…it’s super helpful. It’s like they were here. It’s great. People didn’t have even email back in the day. (David laughs)

Do you do your thumbnails in the scripts as you go through it?

López: Yeah.

And you do your layouts in Clip Studio. When you’re doing the layouts, are you doing those at a larger size but still rough, just kind of laying out the shapes? Or are you pretty in-depth?

López: No, I am a fast artist. Also, the styling here is very blocky. Cartoonish, if you want. So, I can do it quite fast. It’s very organic. But I must say that I use a very close zoom. The document is the same size, but I look at it very small. If you can make a page work in small size, then you can make it work big.

You mentioned considering lettering placement when you are working on this page. One thing I think is interesting about this page are the colors. There’s the speckled paint in the first two panels, but it’s also just an explosively colorful page. I know Cris Peter did the colors, but do you consider color as you’re going through the pages yourself in the same way that you do lettering?

López: No, because I am bad at color.

(laughs) Sure.

López: That’s one of my weaknesses as an artist, and one of those things that you feel that you have to work more on. I know the vibe that I want to put on the page, but I do not know how to do it. Also, this book is a nightmare for Cris because the sky is red all the time which makes everything red, So, you have a limited color palette to play with. It’s been hard because you run out of color palettes after a few pages, Like, “I can do the sky from purple to orange, but nothing more.” You have to do magic tricks to make it work, and she’s doing it.

What we do is more or less the same as what I do with the writer and the editor. Cris and I check the pages. I tell her the story, like, “I want an accent in here. This part is important. This is going to be important later. I have laid out this to be like this.” But I do not tell her, “Make this yellow, make this pink, make this whatever.” I told her at the beginning that I wanted the colors to be very saturated, and she’s doing very well with that. She also likes that, and I’m quite happy.

But it’s always been that the first time I see the colors, whoever is coloring me, I hate them. It’s always like that. So, I check the colors, close them up, and look again a couple of days later. And then I can appreciate it. I only see the pages in black and white (in my head), so all the possibilities are there. But having to make choices is hard. So, I look at them a couple of days later and I say, “This is looking great.” And the more time that passes after I have seen them for the first time, the more I like them.

I’m looking at this page and thinking, “Cris made it work.”

Not the first day, though. (López laughs)

López: Never. I have worked with lots of great colorists, and with all of them, it’s the same. But they’re professionals. In the American industry, you have the best professionals.

You mentioned Riley’s disposition on this page and how that kind of evolved. He is the first issue’s point-of-view character and the heart of the series from the jump. I know FML went through a lot of development, and you had said that Riley came in in a previous version of this idea. Was this how he always looked? Not this pose, but the hair and structure of him and everything? Or did he evolve as well?

López: He’s always looked more or less the same. But this is where I’m doing all the sketching of this book (López holds up a sketchbook), and this was Riley. If you look at him, he has the hair covering one of the eyes and stuff like that. He’s always been very much like that. He was older, but not that much older, so I gave him a little bit of a mustache. But he changed.

It seems like the only thing that really changed was his hair color.

López: Yeah. In one of the first versions, I said, “Yes, this is mostly it.” But the problem was that the guy inside the body changed. The character has evolved a lot, so I wasn’t happy with it. I was like, “There’s something missing,” until we arrived at the final version of the story and I read the script. And then I said, “Now I know who this character is.” So, the design kind of worked better.

One of the most unique parts about this series are those different styles you talked about earlier. There’s a regular world look, there’s Riley’s notebook art, and there’s Patty’s black and white indie cartoonist style. How did those develop? Did you have a clear vision of what those looks needed to be early on?

López: Absolutely not. In an early version, Mom wasn’t a cartoonist. It was like, yeah, she’s creative, but we said, “It would make sense that she was a professional artist.” So, her and Riley would have that much more in common, and that conversation would be possible. And on this page, we also have the mom’s fanzines look. We have mom’s cartoonist style as it is today in panel three, we have in panel four one of Mom’s fanzines, and in panel six, we have Riley’s style. We also have the objective style, which is the one in color.

For her style, I wanted something with crosshatch at the beginning. But after doing some work, it changed. It’s ‘90s American style. You know like Dan Clowes, Charles Burns, or Lynda Barry. More Barry, but also, I need to be able to do my thing. Barry works very much in the physical…you see the paper, the ink, and everything, and that’s far away from what I was looking for. I was aiming for a Sunday comic strip. In my head, Mom is working at the journal or digital or wherever, and she’s doing her daily or weekly strip. So, I wanted that for her. It was quite fast. It didn’t take that much.

What really took a lot of time was Riley’s style. It was hard. And also trying to find a style for Mom’s fanzines, because I wanted it to be photography on photocopy, and that’s very hard to do, technically. But yeah, it worked. Finally.

Did you actually strip out notebook paper for Riley’s sections?

López: Oh, no.

That’d be impressive commitment to the bit.

López: It wouldn’t be that hard. But the result wouldn’t necessarily be that good. At the end of the day, you have to scan that. So you are going back to digital. So I take the texture of a notebook and I put it there and I cut it with the lasso. In these ones, there’s a bit of a cast shadow from the paper, but you can do that easily. I don’t know if in the final version it was, but we made lots of stuff for this. And also, Clayton made the lined paper effect.

I did want to bring up Clayton. One thing I like on this page is how Clayton lettered “Patty Cake” in the fourth panel. You talked about how you talked with Cris and engaged with everyone on the team. Was there any conversation with Clayton about the best way to mesh your styles? Because the thing about that “Patty Cake” is it feels like your energy. Or is that all him just adapting to you?

López: We talk a lot, Kelly Sue and I, about the third voice. When we are talking about things, I will say, “No, this was your idea,” and she will say, “No, it was yours.” We do not know whose ideas are whose.

It’s everybody’s.

López: Yeah. I don’t know whose idea it is, but we all agree. I haven’t had a creative conversation with Clayton, because I am the one who talks with Cris and Kelly Sue is the one who talks with Clayton. Kelly Sue always wants to give final touches to the lettering. Like, “I want to change this word,” or “I want to change this.” Tiny things that only you can see because it’s very much related to your part. And I do that to poor Cris Peters. I say, “You know this one? Can you change that color just a little bit?” (laughs)

I’m so annoying. I’m so sorry, Cris.