Stefano Gaudiano's Kafka

Kafka (Renegade Press, 1987-1988)
by Steven T. Seagle & Stefano Gaudiano

STEFANO GAUDIANO:
(from an intervew at Comic Book Resources, 14 November 2013)

...That takes me back. [Kafka] was my first professional work. When I was sixteen I started self-publishing with a couple of other artists in the Denver, Colorado area where I was living. It was 1983 when we started, so basically you had Cerebus, Elfquest, First Kingdom, American Splendor and a handful of other independent comic books out. The black and white boom hadn't hit yet. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out at exactly the same time I started self-publishing. A lot of people got the notion, "Hey, we have this distribution system" -- at the time there were half dozen different distributors selling to comic book stores -- and people started realizing what Dave Sim and Wendy Pini and Richard Pini were doing. You could make a comic book, send it out to distributors, bypassing publishers. Honestly, our book wasn't very good but we sold some copies, maybe 1,200 or something. After self-publishing for about two and a half years I met Steve Seagle and if you read the Image edition, we talked about that experience in the back of the book. I was in college and because I'd already had the experience of producing a quarterly comic book religiously, this black and white anthology, I felt confident going in and saying yeah I can handle drawing a miniseries. He'd already sold Kafka as a concept to Renegade and was just looking for an artist, and the editor liked my work. That was my first professional assignment where I made a little money drawing comic books. It was a pretty great experience, and I loved seeing it repackaged by Steve's company, Man of Action, through Image. Marco Cinello added graytones to the black-and white art and did a brilliant job adding a new dimension to the work...

Stefano Gaudiano is currently one of the premier inkers in comics, collaborating Michael Lark  for long runs on Gotham Central and Daredevil. In addition to his inking, Gaudiano has worked as a penciler on a number of projects and his very first professional comic work, Kafka, was re-released by Image Comics in a new edition in 2013. Gaudiano's new project is joining Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's  The Walking Dead.