Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Becker.
Hi Mike, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Today, I am a Savannah-based freelance illustrator and part-time Professor at SCAD. I have worked in comic books, animation, concept design, and video games. I’m originally from Albany, NY, but for the majority of my life, I grew up in Delco just south of Philadelphia. I genuinely have been drawing my entire life, and I really just never stopped. To go back as far as possible, I really got started by drawing my own little stories of superheroes and Disney characters on printer paper at the coffee table. So, my origin has actually always been visual storytelling. Sometime during middle school, I was a huge fan of the artist Alex Ross. And my parents took me to meet him in New York City. I think that’s when a future as an artist first became tangible to me, and after that, it was never going to be anything else. So, I studied illustration at a small state school in Maryland called Towson University, and eventually, I graduated with my MFA from SCAD in 2017.
My first real art gig was drawing a webcomic for Dropout.TV, a streaming site for Collegehumor. I worked with them for about a year until I moved to Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the project dissolved before it was published. After that, I tried to balance a day job with my blossoming art career without much success.
I actually have the pandemic to thank for kickstarting my career. When I was furloughed by the job I was working at the time, I immediately decided I wasn’t going back. And I left the city and spent the lockdown at my family house with a lot more time to draw. That’s when I connected with a writer over Twitter, and we decided to collaborate on a project together. We spent a few months brainstorming and developing the story and fall 2020, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the publishing of our comic book, “Young Offenders!”
That’s what really ignited everything because not long after that I was recruited to do some storyboard revisions at Warner Bros Animation on “The Legion of Superheroes,” and my social media presence really escalated around that time. After that, the art jobs started coming more frequently and an opportunity to teach at SCAD came up. After a couple of years in my hometown, I was ready for anything, and moving back to Savannah was a dream come true. So, I started teaching last summer and have been doing professional art projects on the side since.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Certainly not smooth. From my experience, art jobs come in waves. And there can be a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about when the next right opportunity will manifest or work out in those drought periods. On top of that, it’s hard to not take these things personally. Art is such a personal thing, and as a creator, it’s difficult to separate the work from your own value. It takes confidence and encouragement to stay positive and creative. And I have battled times when I was really deeply demoralized. Last February before I moved back to Savannah, I was in a drought period that felt particularly dire. I spent about a week applying to probably a minimum of fifty jobs in every direction with the mindset that I was leaving this dream behind “for real this time” and that I had foolishly wasted the last decade of my life. Sounds dramatic, but that’s definitely how it felt at the time. Thankfully, it was a vain attempt. And like all seasons of life, the drought passed when my Instagram account got super popular. It feels petty to care about follower numbers, but it has translated into actual tangible work on top of just feeling artistically emboldening.
I’ve also worked a lot of odd jobs along the way to stay afloat too. I’ve worked as a swim coach, in retail, at multiple gyms, at multiple campus bookstores, a dog biscuit company, and a music venue. Lotta jobs! And those jobs were a great way to accumulate life and leadership experience, but they do demand time and sacrifice. And they kept me from my desk a lot.
So, motivation and inspiration are the challenges I’ve faced creatively. I know that I can get in my own way mentally, so that’s been a focus of mine to build a routine and a healthier internal dialogue around creating. If I can figure out how to defeat procrastination, I will let everyone know.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
The shortest version is that I am an illustrator. A visual storyteller focusing on comic books, character design, and concept and visual development. Character design is my specialty and certainly what I am best known for. Even beyond my professional character design work, I will put my personal twists on familiar characters just for fun. Last year, I drew redesigns of 50+ X-Men characters in chronological order of appearance to promote a Kickstarter campaign for my comic book, “Young Offenders!” “Young Offenders!” is the series I co-created over the course of the pandemic and probably my biggest accomplishment so far. It’s a 90-page story about a group of juvenile delinquent superheroes that take over for the old heroes and break a cycle of death and rebirth. I did all of the art, from concept design to page layouts, drawing, and coloring on the main story. But it was certainly a team effort. Mark Stack was the lead writer and an excellent collaborator, and Jodie Troutman organized and designed all of the text in the book. I have always wanted to make comics, and finally having my name on a tangible book that I drew was a really proud moment for me.
I think what sets me apart from other artists has been my art style. I know this because it’s the number one thing I hear from anyone, whether they love my work or hate it. And the first question people usually ask is how I developed my art style. I have very clean line work, a sleek design sense, and am almost always considering movement. My work bends a little psychedelic, especially in the colors, but even in the ways I distort anatomy for the sake of cartooning.
Art style is something that comes with time. So, what I tell my students is always a two-fold piece of advice: Draw WAY more and pull from a wider range of artistic influences.
I am always drawing. I have been keeping a series of sketchbooks that I fill to completion since 2017, and right now I am on my thirty-first. Just like any physical activity, expertise requires repetition and practice.
When artists start out, they usually have a hero that they want to be just like. Like I said before, when I was younger, I was a huge fan of Alex Ross. He’s a classically trained painter with realistic figures. Which if you’re looking at my work today, is a wildly different look that where I am now. But growing up, I wanted to be just like him. And that gave me a foundation in really learning anatomy and attempting realism. But when I was a senior in college, I discovered Chris Samnee, who is almost an opposite aesthetic. His work is super streamlined, charming, cartoony, and a brilliant storyteller. And it was this epiphany moment where I realized I could draw however I liked. So mentally, I consider Ross and Samnee the opposite ends of the binary from my art style spectrum. Two very different influences that I aim to be somewhere in the middle of. Someday!
What were you like growing up?
People forget, but I was a huge nerd growing up (people do not forget this). Before it eventually became the mainstream media juggernaut it is today, I was big superhero fan, comic book collector, and art nerd. Which, at the time, was my humiliating high school secret. Overall, I come from pretty vanilla origins. I grew up in the suburbs with my family and was a really big swimmer. Pools pretty much defined every major friendship I made from ages 8 to 22. I was on the swim team, a lifeguard, and I played some club water polo in undergrad.
Contact Info:
- Website: mikejbecker.com
- Instagram: mikebecker14
- Twitter: mikejbecker
Image Credits
Mike Becker
