Images courtesy of David Mattingly
To attend Loscon is to travel from the present to a simpler time, before the ascension of the all-swallowing marketplace-slash-cosplay-orgy that is Comicon. Run by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society—the oldest continuously operating science-fiction club in the world—Loscon found a gaggle of nerd lifers wearing an assortment of commemorative jackets and button pins, wandering in and out of musty, 80s-era conference rooms at the LAX Marriott.
It is here that I met David Mattingly, who was at the convention to speak on a sparsely attended panel of illustrators discussing the question of how artists can make a living in the age of piracy and low publishing sales. Throughout the conversation onstage, Mattingly—who sported a goatee and a thicket of hair tied at the nape of his neck—seemed relatively unworried about the future of his profession. This is not because his own illustration business is still booming, but because Mattingly goes to sleep every night contented with the knowledge that because of Animorphs, his legacy will last into perpetuity.
Oh, yeah. David Mattingly is responsible for 50 of the 53 illustrations covering K.A. Applegate's bestselling Animorphs series.
Launched in the summer of 1996 and carrying on until 2001, the Animorphs franchise—which included a frankly ludicrous TV show on Nickelodeon starring the actor who would go on to play Iceman, and also that dude who would go on to be the dude from Royal Pains, and also (god help us all) a new film rumored to be in development—swiftly became a super-successful staple of 1990s pop culture (not to mention Scholastic book fairs) with its portrayal of five teens who'd been given powers by aliens. Specifically, the power to transform into any animal they touched to fight other aliens threatening to enslave the human race.
That the series attained such heights is thanks in part to its immediately recognizable covers, each of which featured a series of photos of a teen transforming into an animal. Though Mattingly wasn't the original Animorphs artist, his covers—starting with #4, The Message, and continuing through the final, 54th book and onto the auxiliary Megamorphs spinoffs (don't ask)—would end up constituting some of the first major computer-based "morphing" art. On top of that, his work ended up embodying the exact type of creatively adventurous and genuinely groundbreaking work that, impressive as it was in the 90s, looks hilariously, almost iconically insane today.
After the panel, camped out in a lounge area upstairs, Mattingly and I chatted about his claim to fame, as well as his bonus resumé items, his teaching career, and his uncommonly progressive views on the state of science fiction today.
VICE: How did you get into illustration?
David Mattingly: As a kid I was very influenced by comic books, and I originally thought I wanted to become a comic book artist, but I've never been terribly fast. I figured out that, as a cover artist, you're able to work longer. I think to make a living as a comic artist, at least in those days, you had to do at least a page a day, and that was still slow.
Yeah. It's like, come on, we live in an era where we're dealing with important issues of race rights and transsexual rights, and those are incredibly important issues. Of course those would be the books that would be honored!
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It seems like you have a very optimistic view of your industry.
Part of the reason I love teaching is because I have contact with young people. I think, as you get older, if you don't present yourself with opportunities to have contact with young people, you'll want the old way, the way things were, to remain. I see so many kids with so many successful solutions. They are not my solutions, and I don't feel like I really need to hang on to those solutions. I thought some of them were great, and I'm happy I worked during that time, but there are lots... The whole thing about DeviantArt and how you can be discovered through these new mechanisms—20 years ago, they didn't exist at all.
Does it make you sad?
The state of art shows and conventions makes me sad because you can no longer see originals. There was so much emphasis on seeing artist originals. It was the way that I could learn about new artists that were up and coming that I really wanted to follow. Now everyone's working digitally. I still have all my old paintings at home, but they're a pain in the ass to haul around. This weekend, I brought my lenticular 3D paintings, which are a unique item. They can't be reproduced, so if you want to see them, a convention is the only place you can see them.
I appreciated what you were saying about your students. What do you see as how the state of your industry, I guess, the state of matte painting, the state of book cover illustration, what is it like? What does it look like if you're a young person who is getting out into those fields? What can they expect?
I think books will have much less of an impact on your generation than it had on my generation. I think that will increase. I think the number of people that will read books is going to go down, and that's sort of sad. But we live in a visually dazzling world, and if you see the new Michael Bay movie, are you then going to come home and read a print book? Even if it's on a Kindle, that's a pretty boring activity.
I think our brains are getting wired for more stimulus. The magic of reading a book, when your brain goes to that special place—it's going to get harder for young people to get into that place. Is that good or bad? I don't know.
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