Class of 1986, comic illustrator
Comic book artist Darick Robertson, co-creator of the comic book series “Transmetropolitan” and “The Boys,” designed the current Aragon logo in 1984, during his sophomore year at Aragon.
“[The school] was unhappy with [the old logo],” Robertson said. “So they put out a contest for the students to redesign the mascot. I entered the contest because I just thought I could do something more interesting and I love comics and superheroes. I wanted to make [the Don] reflect the ‘A’ by making him stand in a very heroic position.”
The logo has remained the same since, surprising even Roberston.
“I’m flattered. … I took my kids to the campus one day and I was blown away,” Robertson said. “I was like ‘Wow, they’re still using it,’ [and] that made me very happy. It kind of warms my heart because I wasn’t that great of a student and I didn’t really like high school. Most of [the other students] made fun of me for drawing, ironically.”
Although successful now, Robertson didn’t always have the best time in school.
“School was never my thing,” Robertson said. “I knew what I wanted to do, and it’s pretty hard to convince anybody when you’re a teenager that you know what you’re doing, but I decided I wanted to be a comic artist when I was 10 and that’s all I did until I made it. I was always told, ‘that’s going nowhere. Don’t spend all your time drawing.’”
Robertson’s passion for comics started when he was a kid, with the “Peanuts” comics.
“I remember the very first thing I ever drew successfully was Snoopy,” Robertson said. “I could draw Snoopy on his doghouse … from memory. When you’re a little kid and you can do something like that, it’s like you’re doing a magic trick.”
Later, Robertson started reading DC Comics’s “The Flash” and collecting any comic books he could find. Robertson recalls an image in “The Flash” that inspired him to start drawing comics.
“It’s each shot of The Flash as he’s moving, but if you followed it with your eyes … you could see him running super fast. As a kid, I was like, ‘that’s amazing,’” Robertson said. “Suddenly I needed to know how the magic was done. I started … trying to learn to draw them … and slowly but surely I started to crack that code.”
From there, Robertson tried to create his own comics with his original character Nightwind.
“I [started] putting my own comic books together with typing paper,” Robertson said. “I would just staple them and then I would fill them up to make them look like a real comic book. I designed a little logo. … I was manifesting a career in comics.”
Back in seventh grade, however, Robertson wanted to be a lawyer.
“I was telling a friend of mine that I wanted to be a lawyer and he’s like ‘you’re going to be defending somebody for murder and [you’ll] be drawing Superman on your yellow pad while you know you’re supposed to be taking notes and keeping this person out of jail,’ and I laughed but … a little light bulb went off. I’m like, ‘he’s 100% right. That is exactly what I would be doing.’”
After that moment, Robertson started seeing comics in a different way.
“I started to realize that on the first page of every comic book, there were names of people who made the comic books that I enjoyed,” Roberson said. “There was an artist, there was an editor, there was a colorist, there’s a whole list of names of the people that brought you that comic. And I’m like, ‘Well, clearly they’re not doing this for free. This must be somebody’s job.’ And then I started to think, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’ And then I had this vision … I could have just a little house, a little yard and all I had to do every day was get up and draw comic books and I could make a living. That would be heaven.”
In 1986, during his senior year of high school, Robertson published his first comic at a time when “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” was a big comic. The comic was called “Space Beaver.”
“I loved the idea of these cute little characters but really angsty and dramatic,” Robertson said. “And then if they got shot or fight, blood and guts would fly out of them. There was bone and brain underneath that fuzzy, cute skull.”
Robertson was at his after-school job as a bill collector when he met a security guard named Michio Okamura, now a computer game developer and artist who worked as the lead artist on the computer game Diablo, inking in his sketchbook. Okamura showed Robertson his professional materials and how to make a proper comic book page.
“Michio was very encouraging and he gave me some bristol board,” Robertson said. “I created about nine pages in ballpoint pen, panel by panel, of ‘Space Beaver’ and he really liked it. He liked the characters I’d come up with and he thought it was cool and funny.”
Okamura showed the comic to his publisher and they agreed to run it as a backup feature in another comic book. However, it never actually made it into the back of the series it was intended for, as Robertson took his comic to Tibor Sardy, the owner of Peninsula Comics, who agreed to publish Robertson’s work as a standalone series instead. The comic ran for 11 issues and gave him more legitimacy in the comic book industry.
Between ‘Space Beaver’ and his first professional comic there were three to four years in which Robertson would take any job that paid him to draw. One of the bigger projects he got to work on was the comic adaptation of “Child’s Play 2.”
“I was able to do a decent enough job adapting it considering my meager art skills at the time,” Robertson said. “It did pretty well … and it was the first comic I ever had that was published in color. So now I had a color[ed] comic book that I could show editors and that job got me [the opportunity] to work on ‘Justice League,’ which was crazy because it was one of my favorite books.”
After drawing for “Justice League,” he was able to land a job with Marvel and work on an issue of “Wolverine.” After working with Marvel and DC, Robertson became the artist for the “Transmetropolitan” and later “The Boys.”
Because of his work, Robertson gets to go around the world and meet different people.
“I love that I can go to a completely different country where people don’t even speak English very well and I will meet people that are excited about my work,” Robertson said. “And [starting off as a] little kid from San Mateo that just taught himself to draw, that [always] blows my mind. You throw a pebble in the water and the ripples just keep going.”
Robertson recalls a convention he went to in Germany.
“There was a giant [image of ‘Transmetropolitan’ protagonist] Spider Jerusalem over the front door,” Robertson said. “I went into the front door with this long line and … said, ‘who is this for?’ [The person there] looked at me incredulously and went ‘It’s for you … They’ve been waiting since nine o’clock this morning.’ That blew my mind.”
‘The Boys’ would later be adapted into a popular television series on Amazon Prime Video. During the production of the first season of ‘The Boys,’ Robertson flew to Toronto and got to meet the actors and directors.
“I went in and people were all really excited to meet me,” Robertson said. “The director sits [in a specific place] and then there’s a few producers behind them with their chairs. And there was a chair with my name on it. I couldn’t believe it, I got a little misty-eyed. My father died back in 1997 and he was very supportive of my career when a lot of people weren’t. I felt like if my dad could see this, … [he would be] beaming with pride. [I thought,] ‘Look, Dad, there’s a chair with my name on it.’”
Robertson got to watch the production for a few days as well.
“For the first time, I felt that I made it big because I was sitting down in a chair on the set of a thing that I had created,” Robertson said. “There were all these famous actors running around and it was a full production. I sat there for 12 hours. I never got sleepy because I was just fascinated watching them film everything.”
On set, he even met a stand-in for the character Mother’s Milk, who asked him for a hug. Robertson recalls their conversation.
“[He said,] ‘I just want you to know, because of this job, my wife and I are going to be able to start a family. … That’s because of you, man.’” Robertson said. “I’m like, ‘This was a big production’ and he said, ‘No, no, no, don’t don’t do that. This is because of you. You thought of something and it became all of this. And because of that, I’m going to have a family.’”
Currently, Robertson is working with independent producers Abdallah Jasim and AJ Zaheer, to make comic book the series ‘Crestar and the Knight Stallion,’ working as a creative producer and art directing, editing and script writing.
