By the nature of the form, the world of comic books is full of creative people who excel at both the visual and verbal arts. But even there, David Mack is a multitalented artist and writer of skill and prolificacy.

A writer and illustrator on some of Marvel’s biggest titles, Mack created the graphic novel series Kabuki when he was barely 20 years old, which has since gone on to have more than 2 million copies in print in the United States alone. He helped revolutionize the Daredevil comic book upon joining its team in the late ‘90s, establishing many of the themes and storylines currently offered by today’s Netflix counterpart. And, among many other achievements we don’t have space to list here, Mack designed groundbreaking covers for Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias comic that merged elegant watercolor paintings into hypnotically beautiful mixed-media collages. Each of these covers was a sophisticated work of art, so ten years later, Mack was brought in to lend that same sensibility to the title sequence of Jessica Jones, Netflix’s series starring the popular detective who was first introduced on Alias’ pages.

The above show open was produced by Los Angeles creative studio Imaginary Forces, where Mack was afforded a desk in a “secluded room that was curtained off from the rest of the studio.”

Here, he would become a one-man image factory, churning out “all kinds of cityscapes, alleyways, urban settings, stressed buildings and windows.” Mack estimates he did hundreds, “if not thousands” of paintings in this manner, covering the walls around him with them, and passing them on to the Imaginary Forces team for layering into the animated sequence. He said creating such an enormous amount of artwork was “a lot more relaxing than it is when I’m writing or drawing a comic book, where every panel has to fit together and work in sequence, and work collectively on a page and all those pages have to work together… This was almost like a research and development situation where I would do all these images, at first just trying to generate as much diversity as possible and not necessarily thinking through all the details and the first step. It was kind of a fun, relaxing adventure to do it that way.”

For many viewers, the Jessica Jones titles have served as an entryway to Mack’s work, but are in fact just the latest in a decades-long career crafting powerful works that burn with their own inner life. It’s an arc that began when he was 16, and decided to make a comic book as part of his college applications.

“I found that all these different things that I loved doing—writing and storytelling and even these other mediums I enjoyed [like] photography and painting – [that] Comic books and graphic novels were the medium that united every other medium, and I could do them on my own.”

A page from Mack's "Kabuki."
A page from Mack’s “Kabuki.”

That first comic book helped Mack win a scholarship to Northern Kentucky University, where in 1993 he began working on a new comic book called Kabuki, a story set in a futuristic Japan and starring a female assassin dealing with issues of nationalism, heritage, memory and pain. He “was barely 20 years old and probably looked like I was 14,” but already Mack could see that comic books were a place to “tell personal stories but through the metaphor of something else,” he said.

Fascinated by autobiographical works by the likes of Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar, Mack “loved these comics where people would make sense of their lives inside these stories… but I was so young I didn’t feel unselfconscious enough to fully be able to do that in an authentic way.” Worried he would “do an idealized version of myself or something,” Mack strove, with Kabuki, to “make as many of the superficial aspects as different as possible.”

Grounded in his college studies of Japanese language and history, it became “a great laboratory to integrate all of the different things I was learning about and was passionate about, but gave me the freedom to work out very personal things that I was dealing with at the time.”

Mack turned in Issue No.1 of Kabuki for his senior thesis in literature, but he also managed to find a small publisher for it called Caliber Press, which meant that he officially became a professional graphic novelist before he had even graduated college. Shortly after the book came out, he met Joe Quesada at a comic book convention, the future editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. Quesada was impressed enough by Kabuki that when he joined Marvel a few years later, he brought Mack on board with him, inviting him to be a writer on Daredevil.

Quesada had one directive for Mack: Create a brand new character that was unique to Daredevil, which had a history of borrowing many of its figures from The Amazing Spider-Man. So Mack began considering Matt Murdock’s long history of girlfriends and adversaries, which led him to a profound realization: “Here’s a guy who’s blind so he perceives the world differently from everybody else, which is a natural kind of separation for him,” he said. “I thought that would be interesting if he ran into another character who perceived the world in a very unique way, who also had to decipher the world and put it together as a puzzle. That they were missing one sense and using all the other senses to put it together.”

That kindred spirit emerged as the character of Maya Lopez, AKA Echo, a deaf, Native American superhero who, like Daredevil, had a preternatural ability honed by a reliance on her remaining senses: to perfectly copy the movements, and therefore inhabit the abilities of, people ranging from an Olympic athlete to a concert pianist, to Daredevil himself. In developing Echo, Mack drew on tales his own Cherokee uncle had told him as a child, and in turn, dug deeply into the new character’s childhood, which allowed him to organically paint a complete picture of how her unique powers had evolved.

“If you grew up without any sense of hearing and someone told you the rain makes a noise,” Mack said, “then you would also think, ‘Wow, if I see something in the weather and you’re telling me it makes a noise, does the sun also make a noise? Do clouds make a noise? I could imagine a child having this wonder about that, and I felt that, as a child, Echo would have to work so hard to make sense of everything, to piece things together visually, and she would use that as her own sort of language in a way and develop a sense of pattern recognition, which I guess is probably what her skill is – to be able to see everything and visualize it as a kind of language.”

The exploration of identity through the lens of early development seems to inform much of what Mack writes. Despite having created two of comics’ most memorable and complex female characters, he said, “I never think in terms of writing from a gender or an ethnic point of view… I just always look a it from a human point of view. When I’m writing the adult characters I usually go back to their childhood and think what happened in their childhood to make them who they are.”

In fact, the character Mack related to most strongly while writing Daredevil “was Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin,” he said, “because even a guy like that who you might want to label as a villain, he doesn’t see himself as a villain of course. He’s probably reacting to something based on his environment and experience as a child.” Netflix’s adaptation of the comic book incorporates some of the details Mack added to Kingpin’s backstory, which include an abusive upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen at the hands of his cruel father, and a shocking murder.

Most comic book characters, Mack said, whether classified as “heroes” or “villains” are “Heroes in their own minds… trying to rectify their formative experiences.”

Creators such as Mack have elevated the comic book form, deepening the psychology of superheroes and their foes even as many of these characters have becomes the figureheads of a billion-dollar global industry. One reason for the exponential rise of comic books and all their media offshoots is that they have come to be populated by fully fleshed-out human beings, with all the layers, motivations and issues therein, and therefore connect with people of all ages around the world.

But all the blockbuster films, toy lines and video games aside, television, Mack said, is the ideal platform for filmic reboots of comic book franchises. Whether streaming all at once on Netflix or coming piecemeal through traditional broadcast, “you can see how having a whole season really gives you time to flesh out the characters and it’s more closely related to the source material in that they’re both episodic in nature,” he said. “Each episode has its own beginning and ending, but with a cliffhanger that propels it to the next one.”

Mack seems primed to create and/or head up an original TV series of his own. Aside from his titles for Jessica Jones, he has made other significant inroads into show business. He designed the “‘70s-era political spy thriller” images that populate the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and seemed thrilled to have created the last two seasons of Dexter Early Cuts episodes for Showtime, a supplemental web series that let him deliver his specialty—expressing a character’s humanity by way of their childhood—“with voice actors and everything.”

Meanwhile, Kabuki has kicked around Hollywood boardrooms for years, traveling from HBO to Fox and beyond. At one time it was in the hands of film producer Lawrence Bender, who had an intriguing idea for dual film versions in both Japan and the United States. Mack had to remain mum about where it’s being developed now, but seemed hopeful about its prospects on the small screen. “I would be excited to do Kabuki as a long-form episodic TV show,” he said.

With Jessica Jones already renewed for another season, the time is right for another strong comic book woman to enter the airwaves, though Mack might argue that time has been right for a while.

“It wasn’t that mysterious to me that a strong character like Jessica Jones would be successful as a comic or TV show,” he said. “From the time Kabuki came out, over 20 years ago, my experience has been that I had about a 50/50 readership with male and female… I’ve always known from the beginning it was a reality that both genders loved comics and loved good story.”

To read this story and more as part of the March issue of Best of Brief, go here.

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