Geoffrey Darrow and his family recently moved to Chicago from Paris, and apparently customs officials were less than delicate while inspecting their stuff. “The piano was delivered upside down in the crate,” he says. Fortunately his foot-tall Bruce Lee doll, which is sitting on top of a drawing table, survived the trip. “You can put it in any pose and put the little clothes on it,” he says. “It’s good to see the folds and the anatomy beneath it.” The doll is part of Darrow’s ever-expanding collection of reference materials. “I’ll pick something up as a model and not use it for a couple years,” he says. “Then I’ll remember, oh yeah, I got one of those. It gives the tax guys headaches: ‘You bought this thing, did you use it?’ ‘No, but I might.’”
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Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Darrow never had any plans for his life other than drawing. He started looking at comics by the age of three or four, before he could even read. “If it had a cool cover I looked at it,” he says. “Anything that had a monster. Or a dinosaur.” The first “real” books he picked up were the Doc Savage paperbacks. “They looked really lurid; I was sorta afraid of them,” he says. “Actually, for a long time I was really disappointed by books with cool covers, because I’d open them and see there were no pictures inside.”
During his time at Hanna-Barbera Darrow met the French artist Moebius, creator of the Blueberry newspaper strip and an innovator in sci-fi-fantasy illustration, who was in LA for the filming of the movie Tron. At the time, Darrow says, Europeans saw comic books “more as an art form” than Americans did, “and Moebius was the guy. I didn’t really belong at a dinner party with him, but I was, and the guy was nice to me. I never showed him anything, but one day he asked what I did for a living. Then he asked to see my drawings.”
In 1995 the two collaborated again on Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, a much more innocent tribute to old monster movies and sci-fi stories, with Darrow handling pencil and ink duties. When he first delivered the panels, he says, the folks at Dark Horse needed a magnifying glass to pick out all the tiny details. Knowing the full effect would be lost once the illustrations were colored, lettered, and resized for publication, the company wound up printing a second version of the comic in a larger black-and-white softcover format so fans could see what the drawings looked like naked. A similar reprinting of Hard Boiled followed.
