Barry Tan, a talented comic book creator, finds inspiration in the action-packed cartoons of the ’80s and the groundbreaking artistry of legends like Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. Known for his adaptability and passion for visual storytelling, Tan has contributed to acclaimed indie projects such as G.H.O.S.T Agents and Stan Vs Jack: How to Feud the Marvel Way. With a deep appreciation for the craft, he continues to explore new creative frontiers, blending classic influences with innovative storytelling techniques.
Read our exclusive interview with Barry Tan as he shares insights into his creative journey, influences, and the making of his standout projects.
Interviewee: Barry Tan
Interviewer: Anthony Andujar Jr
1/20/2025
Q1 What started you on the path to being a comic book illustrator? Who were your influences?
BT: As a Child of the ’80s, it was the Golden age of action-adventure cartoons, with shows like He-Man, G.I.Joe, Transformers, M.A.S.K, etc. My earliest comics were British hardcover Annuals that reprinted and collected Dino-Riders, G.I.Joe (Action Force in the UK), and Transformers comics by Marvel. From there, I branched into comics like Avengers, Silver Surfer, and Spider-Man.
Gradually I started recognizing the work of various artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Byrne, and Jim Starlin and developed a strong appreciation for comic books as both a source of inspiration and a storytelling medium. My biggest artistic influences are writer/artists like Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Walter Simonson, Charles Burns, Moebius, and Richard Corben. Some of my recent influences include guys like Brandon Graham, Tom Scioli, and Jim Rugg.
Q2 You’ve contributed art to various projects such as G.H.O.S.T Agents, Big Big Bang Comics, Love & Grendels, Darkest Image 1 & 2, Splitting Image, Batman Year Wha? Kayfabe The Death of Superman, and Contraband Comic Cavalcade to name a few. What’s the journey been like working on each of those projects, and how did it inform you as a visual storyteller?
BT: On a personal level, the best thing about working on all these projects has been discovering a community of like-minded individuals through the Cartoonist Kayfabe Ring Seats group, getting to know them, and collaborating with them on what are essentially fun passion projects. From a craft perspective, all the stories/ illustrations I did were intentionally designed to help me stretch my art chops. Practically every story or illustration was drawn in a different art style. That meant studying a lot of different artists and experimenting with new and different tools to hopefully capture the nuances of their styles.
Between Darkest Image Volume 1 and 2, I went from working traditionally to going digital, which offers me greater control of all aspects of the creative process as a storyteller; I.e. color, typography, lettering, and book design. My entire working process has essentially changed over the course of working on all these projects. It’s been a great learning curve.
Q3. As an illustrator, what are your interests? What draws you to craft stories?
BT: What engages me most when I take on a new project is usually the research. Read up not just on comics and art books but also on subjects like graphic design, writing novels, screenwriting, and film directing. Regardless of the medium, they all boil down to the same thing; telling a story. There are film techniques/ screen-writing exercises/ Directorial tips that can be folded back into my toolkit as a visual storyteller. I have a pretty voracious appetite for any new knowledge I can obtain.
What draws me to crafting stories is the fact that it’s one big problem-solving exercise and there’s a sense of personal satisfaction in solving that equation. There are a hundred creative decisions to be made when crafting a story and they are all filtered through my personal tastes and sensibilities. Whether the end result succeeds or fails is entirely on me. That’s a creative challenge that’s hard to pass up.
Q4. When crafting a page, what do you find the most challenging? Is it the thumbnail stage? The penciling, the inking, the lettering? What do you find the most intriguing when making a comic solely as a creator that others might take for granted?
BT: The Layout stage is probably the stage I find most challenging. My preliminary thumbnails are really small and scribbly so I can zip through them very quickly. I think I thumbnailed the entire Stan VS Jack book in maybe 1-2 hrs? But laying out the pages is where I have to nail down the basic foundations of the page design, poses, figure work, and storytelling flow. If the layouts don’t work, there’s going to be a lot of wasted effort if I start penciling and adding in all the details and noodling. Conversely, if they are strong enough, I have gone straight to inks without penciling and then figured out lighting/spotting of blacks on the go while inking.
So for me, layouts are the stage that requires the most thinking and concentration, while later stages like inking, and lettering are almost therapeutic for me since I’m working with the safety net that the foundation of the page is already sound. To the second point of the question, what people may take for granted is the importance of pacing in comics. It’s kind of an invisible art because the pacing is the output of a number of different elements. A well-paced comic achieves an ideal balance between text, art, and page design. It gets the reader from point A to B without it feeling too unsubstantial as a reading experience or too much of a slog to get through. My pick for the most perfectly paced comic story of all time is Batman: Year One. And I think that guys like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are also putting out some of the most well-paced comics currently.
Q5. Is there a specific genre that you tend to illustrate from? And how does it impact what you produce?
BT: I actually don’t have a preference for one genre over the other; Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime, Horror, Auto-bio…I’m engaged by most popular genres in equal measure. The genre of whichever story I’m working on however does have a bearing on the final output. If I’m tackling a horror story for example; the artistic influences that will inform the work and even the color choices and art style I use will vary greatly than if I were to a Science Fiction story.
I try to adapt my style on each project to fit the story and that’s part of the fun for me. I feel that the art should always be in service of the story. The downside of that is I don’t have a standard signature art style that people identify me with but artistically it just opens up more possibilities to grow and diversify. And it never gets boring.
Q6 You’ve recently published a book through Cosmic Lion Productions titled Stan Vs Jack: How To Feud The Marvel Way. What inspired you to write and illustrate this project?

BT: In this case, I already had a strong personal interest in the subject matter and was a fan of both Stan and Jack. I thought I had a good grasp on the history between both men and more importantly, an interesting take on the subject that would stand apart from the usual Jack is Good/Stan is Bad fanboy rhetoric.
While on holiday, I was reading the Stan Lee Biography “True Believer” and was thinking about just how vilified Stan was within the fan community. And I started thinking a lot about Stan The Man VS The Myth so the genesis of the book really started there. Specific key scenes and even bits of dialogue started forming in my head and by the end of my short trip, I had the whole flow of the book and a lot of the final dialogue worked out.
I thought the whole Jack Kirby/ Stan Lee/ cocaine/ crack analogy was a very unconventional take on summing up the Lee & Kirby relationship and what Stan brought to the table. I also had ideas on subverting and parodying iconic 60’s Marvel imagery like “This Man, This Monster.” So that sequence in particular and the idea of doing these darkly humorous ’60s Marvel art parodies got me pumped about the project.
Q7 When crafting Stan Vs Jack, how much research and threads did you explore? What kind of rabbit holes did you venture that helped to encapsulate the ideas and debates that were incorporated into the project?
BT: Even before starting on this project, I’d been a reader of The Jack Kirby Collector Magazine for the past 20 years so I was already very familiar with the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby dynamic and the conflict between both men. However, I still did extensive research to see if there were any potential bits of information that could be woven into the story.
I watched all the documentaries that were available on with men and read a ton of Jack Kirby Collector magazines, issues of Comics Journal with interviews with Stan or Jack, old “Stan’s Soapbox” columns, Tom Scioli’s “I am Stan” and “Jack Kirby: King of Comics” bio comics, 2-3 biographical books on Stan and the “Hand of Fire” biographical book on Jack and also various publications from Twomorrows. They also published a book called “Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said” which was a fantastic resource because it collected extensive and actual quotes from both men from radio interviews, fanzines, magazines, etc. that they did all through the collaboration till the late ’60s.
In terms like rabbit holes; both men had such a rich and fascinating history that it would be easy to go off on different tangents…..Jack Kirby’s legal battle with Marvel, Stan’s personal tragedies, the famous article that led to them dissolving their partnership…but I really needed to streamline the narrative to focus on the conflict between the two of them I knew I didn’t want to do a chronological story or an extensive blow-by-blow account because I wanted the story to be accessible to even non-comic readers. So ultimately I landed on the concept of using a decrepit Watcher as the narrator who would be able to verbalize dense historical information in a very conversational matter.
Q8. Is there material that you left out that you wanted to incorporate but couldn’t find a way to fit into the book thematically? And what was the publication process like under Cosmic Lion Productions?
BT: Yes, there’s a 4-5 page sequence that I cut out from the book. The sequence covers how Jack Kirby went on to create entire universes of characters after his partnership with Stan dissolved while Stan had only created 3 notable characters since, namely; She-Hulk, Ravage 2099, and…Striperella. It would have given me an excuse to draw dozens of my favorite 70’s era Kirby Characters but at the time, I felt it was not a crucial segment in terms of advancing the plot much and cut it out. I may yet illustrate and insert this additional sequence if there are future printings of Stanley Vs Jack: How To Feud The Marvel Way.
I also had an idea to insert a mini-comic with the book. The book ends on more of a conciliatory note so my original plan was to insert a note on the next page with the mini-comic pasted on the adjacent page that said: “What?! The end wasn’t Blood-Thirsty enough for you, True Believers? Want to see Jack get his pound of flesh? Then crack open this mini-comic – If You Dare!!” And The Mini-Comic would be drawn in Kirby’s style and would open with Stan opening his eyes in Comicbook Valhalla, which looks like Asgard and Jack welcomes him at the rainbow bridge.
And Stan goes: “Hiya Jack! Hey, We had some good times, didn’t we? let’s get together again, me on scripts, you on the art, whaddaya say kemosabe??” And Jack sees red and proceeds to beat on Stan Lee for the next 10 pages in full Kirby bombast, then Ditko and Wally Wood pop up and join the beatdown and in the end, Stan gets tossed off the Rainbow Bridge into the abyss. It just seemed like a funny way to kind of mock the rabid fanboys who seem to be wishing for cosmic justice to strike down a man who’s already six feet underground.
Q9. What books do you have down the pipeline that readers should keep an eye out for?
BT: My corporate job is pretty full on at the moment so my comics output is very limited. A couple of illustrations or pin-ups here and there. Any free time I have will probably go into personal projects in the foreseeable future. I’m always interested in playing with different formats so I’ve started very preliminary work on putting together a Jack Kirby Zine’.
This zine’ will be probably a mix of written articles, illustrations, and short stories Kirby penciled that I’m inking and also an exploration of different creative concepts/stories as filtered through Kirby’s lens. Jack Kirby is probably my all-time biggest artistic inspiration and my appreciation has only grown deeper with time so this zine’ is my personal exploration of Kirby; as a writer/artist/creator.
Q10. Where can people find your work to keep up to date and follow?
BT: Most of my comic work including “Stan VS Jack: How to Feud The Marvel Way” is published through Cosmic Lion Productions run by the one and only Eli Schwab. CLP also publishes some really cool comics from some of the best indie creators currently out there…check out our books at:
https://cosmiclionproductions.com
I’m also on Instagram @barry_tan, thank you!