X-Men artist and Darksiders Creative Director Joe Madureira talks about his biggest passion in life.
From a very young age, Philadelphia-born Joe Madureira possessed the creative talent to draw comic book characters. His intricate attention to detail and artistic flair made him stand out so much that by the time he was 17 years of age, he was a working comic book professional with a colourful future ahead of him. “I always felt that drawing comics was sort of a personal fulfilment. It’s just you and some music in a room and it’s pretty cool.”
This was during the mid ‘80s, when comic book fans would often have to purchase individual issues of a particular series to find out how the story came to an end. Little did Madureira realise that mainstream book shops would eventually be selling full editions of stories, known as trade paperbacks. “Years ago I never would have imagined that the industry would have moved so much towards trade paperbacks and graphic novels, because I bought all my comics in a small comic shop and now there’s just so many people buying their trades at book shops, or on the web.”
In 2009, PlayStation launched Digital Comics, a new comic service, especially for PSP. The online service allows users to download comics to their PSP systems, so they have a transportable, digitised comic to enjoy anywhere and everywhere. “I know some web comics are cropping up as well so I think definitely having comics on a hand-held device is cool. You could still take it with you like you would with a comic.”
Despite his love of graphic novels and paper-based comics, Madureira is definitely embracing the new, digitised versions that are now so readily available. “I definitely think it’s sort of a natural evolution, and it’s pretty exciting. The potential is really cool.”
The online catalogue of comics stocks everything from well known, major titles such as Transformers and Star Trek, to small independent publishers. There is a wide variety of comics available to download from the Comic Store, which is updated on a weekly basis.
The comics available date from the 1940s to the present day, and cover a range of genres. Within the first two months of Digital Comics going live, there were over a quarter of a million editions downloaded from PlayStation Store.
You can check out some of Joe’s work on the Uncanny X-Men comics at playstationcomics.com.
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