So... you go by Mansperger as a web handle... is it part of your name or some other significant meaning?
Mansperger is my last name - I believe it means "man of the mountain", or at least that is the translation on the wall in my parent's house. I figure with a name like that, whats the point in making something else up? My first name is Rob.
What do you do when your not drawing or writing?
Sleep. Well, not really. I spend time with my family - I have a wife and two sets of twins at home. Allie and Paige are 19 months old, and Quinn and Ava are 4 years old. Truth be told, it takes pretty much all my time to be anywhere near a decent husband and father. You blink an eye and the kids just grow and change.I also work as an "Experience Architect" at a website and web application design agency as my day job. Needless to say, there's another 40+ hours a week gone right off the top.
Is there a family life that re-directs your attentions or perhaps hobbies outside of cartooning?
Outside of family, my hobbies include collecting comics when I can afford them, reading novels - mostly horror and crime dramas, watching movies, and I used to regularly play table top roleplaying games with my friends.
We met over at Outcast studios and have developed a friendship to the level where your now my writer. We still have much to learn about each other to continue that friendship still. I want to touch on the writing. Do you prefer writing over drawing? What past experiences do you have along these lines?
I've always loved being creative, mostly from the drawing side. Writing is always something I've enjoyed as well. Spent many a hour in school in "creative writing" classes from junior high through college. When it comes to sequential art, I find that you need to understand writing a little more in order to really pull together the piece. I've spent hours upon hours looking at how people write their comics. Larry Young published his script for The Making of Astronauts in Trouble, it really blew my mind comparing the script to the finished work - and I would love to read the scriptbook for Demo. The writings of Scott McLeod and Will Eisner have also been extremely valuable tools to me.As for past experiences - in college I wrote a few comic short stories for the Syracuse University "Comics Plus" club, as well as two comic strips in the college paper, The Daily Orange. I've also written a bunch of roleplaying scenarios to put my players through which was a lot more challenging than I ever thought it would be. If you spend time searching through the website Revolution Science Fiction, I've written a couple film reviews and comic reviews as well.My writing is progressing, and I'm pretty excited about the stuff we're doing for your Angelos comic. I think I still have a long way to go with my writing - but at least I've stopped rewriting the same sentence forty times in order to get an entire page written in say, a half hour to two hours.
Where do you see yourself in say... 20 years and do you still see yourself at the drawing table? What would you like to see happen between now and then artistically? Personally? Globally?
Hmmm. There's a stumper... in twenty years I definitely see myself at the drawing table, perhaps wearing my underwear on the outside of my pants as I slowly subcumb to Alzheimer's (and that is only half in jest given the statistics). Hopefully I'll have finished the book I started to put together 10 years ago that is collecting dust in my basement. I'll probably also have at least three weddings under my belt as the kids get older, and those will probably have some interesting tales to weave into sequential pieces.In that timeframe, I hope that my writing and drawing skills will have continued to evolve to take on their own more unique feels. I strive to come up with a personal voice and have a lot of deeply personal stories to put on paper once that voice really starts to come through.Globally, I expect the world to become more turbulent than it currently is and that sequential art will continue to be one of the chronicles of the times and continue to evolve and flourish as well.
That last question was a "heavy" so I'll leave it at that. Is there something more you would like to add or shout out to someone? Feel free.
In closing, I just want to thank you for taking the chance to work with me on your creation and hope that together we can push each other to better places creatively.
Thanks pal, Scott
You can find RMan at the following links...
Posts
