OK, I've got an artistic background (BFA in graphic design, 1997 grad of the Kubert School, freelance artist for 19 years and counting. I've even drawn some of the Star Trek actors a time or two). Let me see if I can alleviate some of the ignorance in this thread...
Is this something that comic artists do a lot of?
Use reference on a licensed comic? If they're smart, yeah.
It'd cost too much to take photos of the actors with new poses and expressions for models, I suppose.
WHAT?!? You think that Shatner or Stewart or ANY working actors are going to take time out of their busy schedules to pose for comic book artists?
No.
Never happening. Not even if the artists say "Please" and take the actors out for cake and ice cream afterwards. Not even if the artists are holding their families hostage. No.
Deadlines in comic books are insanely tight. An artist typically has to produce
at least one page of art a day in order to meet a monthly deadline. There's just no time to contact a busy actor's representation, negotiate an appointment time and payment (I can't imagine the actors ever posing for free), and have the actors sit for them, all for something only .0001% of the readership will ever notice.
There are comic book artists who use a lot of photo reference or even have actor/model friends pose for them (Alex Ross and Tony Harris come to mind), but those are much more the exception rather than the rule. And the models are typically non-famous people who the artists both already know and are local.
Availability and
time are the keywords here.
What's wrong with a little imagination?
If I'm drawing, say, William Shatner, and Mr. Shatner has likeness approval over how he appears in the comic, it would be exceptionally foolish of me to just draw him from memory and hope against hope that he might like it.
Using reference is a
smart thing to do, particularly on a property like
Trek where there's a fanatical fanbase ready to leap down your throat for any minor thing you might get wrong. Using reference saves you time, effort, and frustration, which means that you can produce more product and hopefully make more money (most artists are freelance contractors and not salaried employees, remember).
Using reference does not mean that an artist suffers from a lack of imagination. Reference material is a tool like any other. And if you have a tool available that makes your job easier, why not use it? Should
Christopher write out his novels longhand when he has a computer available? If he can't recall the name of a particular planet, should he rewatch the entire episode, or should he use a reference like
Memory Alpha or
Star Trek Script Search to save himself some time?
And reference, like any tool, can also be overused. There are some artists that are absolute slaves to photo reference, to the point where they can't draw anything without it. That's the point where it becomes counter-productive. If the artist is doing their job really well, you should have trouble telling which panels they used reference for and which ones they didn't.
So then I wonder where they get the facial expressions you haven't seen before?
With something like
Star Trek, there is a TON of reference out there, especially with sites like
TrekCore that have hundreds of screencaps for each episode and movie. After all the hours of Trek most of the actors have starred in, I'd say that most expressions are available to an artist who wants to look long enough.
If the artist has
Trek DVDs or BluRays, they could even pause it at the appropriate moment and draw from that. That's what I did on a
Superman Animated coloring book I penciled where I had to draw some things that DC couldn't provide me model sheets of, like the prison island used on the show or the Phantom Zone projector.
If I was drawing a
Trek story and had to draw, say, Jim Kirk at age 15 or 23, I'd try to find pictures of a young William Shatner to assist me in drawing a convincing version of Kirk as a young man. In cases like this, Google Image Search is an artist's best friend.
I guess the actors can't come in to the studio and make faces for the artists. They could do it remotely, tough that would give "Facetime" a whole new meaning.
No. Not even remotely. The only way I could ever imagine a
Trek actor posing for an artist would be if they happened to be dating or married. And even then, the actor would probably still be pretty busy and travelling a lot.
Is this also true for living actors used in the altered photos in John Byrne's "New Visions" comics?
With Byrne, he has said that CBS/Paramount has provided him a list of TOS actors that have approved the use of their likenesses. Certain ones have not, sometimes because they died with no heirs (like Roger C. Carmel), or because they have not approved it for reasons of their own (like Teri Garr, which is why Roberta Lincoln does not appear in the Gary Seven issue of
New Visions that Byrne did -- She has dialogue through Seven's computer but is not seen). CBS/Paramount doesn't want to open themselves to the potential liability of using likenesses without approval. I know that Ricardo Montalban is also on the "No" List, which is why we won't see a
New Visions issue featuring Khan.
BTW, Byrne, by his own admission, is not great with likenesses, so the Photoshop methods he uses to produce
New Visions have enabled him to tell a lot of TOS stories he likely wouldn't have been able to otherwise. In his drawn
Trek comics, he traced the likenesses of Jon Colicos and William Campbell for panels where Kor and Koloth appeared. He worked out rough approximations of Robert Lansing's and DeForest Kelley's likenesses (a beard on a character can hide a multitude of sins), and his Roberta Lincoln was more of generic pretty girl face with a different hairstyle in each issue than an attempt at actually drawing a young Teri Garr.
Byrne has a long thread available on his Forum that details the
New Visions project from its inception up to the latest issue. It can be read
here and will likely answer any questions you have about his working methods and such.
If you have any other general questions about illustration, cartooning, or how comics in general are produced, I'd be happy to answer them as best I can (I likely won't be able to answer them until Saturday at the earliest, though).
