Dave Gibbons

With the 'Watchmen' comic, we attempted to tell it in an accessible way. I deliberately made the artwork very clear, deceptively so. You think you're sucking on a sweetie, but it turns out to be a sugar-coated chili.

I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.

The leg system of the beach animals works because of a combination of certain lengths of tubes. Because of the proportion of lengths, the animals walk smoothly. You could say that this range of numbers is their genetic code.