Riley Rossmo visited the students at ACAD last week and among the words of wisdom he imparted was a variation on the idea that a person needs to do something for 10000 hours in order to be truly be good at it. For comic books the idea is an artist needs to do 1000 pages (which he figured would work out to about 10000 hrs) to get to where they needed to be as a comic book artist.
With all the comics that Riley has published he is far beyond that page count – and his work is pretty amazing because of it. The final issue of his most recent series Rasputin was released just last week and is his finest work to date. It must be a daunting challenge to take a subject from the dusty past and make it into something exciting and relevant to a contemporary audience. Riley's interpretation of Rasputin seems to do it effortlessly, it just seems natural that Rasputin appear as this post modern action anti-hero.
