Pulp and Noir, From Father to Son: Interview with Sean and Jacob Phillips

In the world of comics, artist duos composed of father and son are quite rare. From John Romita Sr. and Jr. to Joe Kubert and his sons Andy and Adam in the U.S., and Alberto and Enrique Breccia in Argentina, these partnerships stand out. Since 2018, with the Criminal volume My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, Sean and Jacob Phillips have joined this exclusive club. Sean, as illustrator, and Jacob, as colorist, have been working together ever since. The long-standing partnership between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, built on 25 years of storytelling, now extends to the Phillips family. Together, they’ve created works like Reckless, Criminal, Night Fever, and more. These stories center on pulp and noir themes while exploring a variety of subjects and settings, always linked by a strong narrative thread filled with evocative storytelling and compelling characters.
Meanwhile, Jacob has also launched his own career as an illustrator. He collaborates with Chris Condon on the gripping noir series That Texas Blood (published in Italy by Cosmo) and with Chip Zdarsky on Newburn, a story about a former detective working for organized crime. Sean and Jacob Phillips were among the standout guests at Lucca Comics & Games 2024, where they presented the second and final volume of Newburn for Saldapress. They also introduced Where the Body Was, their latest collaboration with Ed Brubaker. This new work combines noir with the atmosphere of a summer adolescent adventure and an ensemble novel, built on rich character development and interactions. It spans genres from romance to coming-of-age stories.
We spoke with the Phillips about their careers, their working relationship with Brubaker, and, most importantly, their bond with each other, which has evolved from a familial connection to a professional partnership.

First of all, I would ask what it’s like to work together as father and son, from both perspectives, that of the father, who watched the artist grow up, and that of the son, who grew up with the artist.
Sean Phillips: It’s really good together with Jake, I had no idea he could do that until he did, and luckily he’s good at it. He started because I was going to color a book myself and I ran out of time, so I did the first two pages and got Jake to color the next 60 pages and then I liked what he did, Ed liked what he did, so we carried on doing that, and it’s great.
I try not to treat him as a son while we’re working together, I try to keep it professional and I just keep out of his way and let him do what he wants very occasionally. He might get some notes from me, but not very often. We don’t live near each other either, so that helps.
We’re not in the same room, that definitely helps, because I would be over his shoulder all the time. It happened during lockdown, he came home and I was over his shoulder for a couple of months.
Jacob Phillips: Yeah, that was horrible (laugh). For me, it’s mostly just like working with anyone else, so it’s all just over email,he sends me the pages and I send about the colors. I would say the only difference is that there are probably less notes because he just sort of lets me get on with it, whereas if I had an editor or another client, they’d probably have more note. So it’s actually probably easier doing it like this than working with other people.
S: And the other good thing about it is that we get to go to festivals like this and hang out for the weekend. Isn’t it, Jake? (smile). You know, I don’t see as much of my other two sons as I do with Jake, so it’s good.

It’s interesting to know how Jacob started. Did you always wanted to do the colors, or did you start more thinking about doing the whole art of a comic book?
J:I was already doing illustration, first at university and then doing freelance illustration for a few years.  I started working on my own comics around the same time that I started coloring my father’s comics as well.
S: Probably five years?
J: Yes, about five years before I started coloring. I knew technically how to do it because I colored my own illustrations, although not in the same kind of comic book style. In a sense it was a bit of a gamble to see if I could actually do it.

And having your son coloring your comics did somehow changed your work? Looking, for example, at the very first Criminal and the last thing you did, like Where the Body Was, the colors, the vibes are somehow different.
S: I think that in Where the body was the coloring changed because I purposely drew it differently than I usually do. There isn’t any black, hardly any shadows. So I knew I could trust Jake to fill it in with the right colors. Before then, all the other books we’ve done, the Reckless books and the Criminal stuff we’ve done together, I tend to make sure that the colors can’t mess it up, because I’ve been doing it so long, that’s automatically how I think about it. So I try to put enough there to make it obvious where the light source is, what sort of feel I want. Over time, I needed to worry about that stuff. Of course every book looks a little different to the one before, but to me there’s anything to do with having Jake as a colorist.

If you had to choose one, which comic would be the one that bonds you the most? Not only professionally, but also on a personal level, something special for you.
J: I would say the first one, My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, because it was such a specific look as well, and it was obviously the first one that we’d done together. So I think that was probably the most back and forth we had on the colors. Also, dad set a palette to work with within the book, so it was much more of a joint effort, whereas now he just leaves me to do what I want.
S: For me, I think the first Reckless book was probably the first one where it felt different, because before then, the other Criminal stuff we did together, apart from Junkies, there’d already been loads of other colorists on it before, while Reckless was totally new for both of us, that’s the first one where it felt and looked different.

A crucial figure in both of your work is Ed Brubaker. I’d like to talk about your relationship with him, the moment you came into contact and how your professional relationship has evolved over the year, from both sides because you know him in a different way.
S: We started working together because I was inking a comic that he was writing and someone else was drawing it, Michael Lark: he drew and inked the whole of the first issue himself, and then he didn’t really like what he did, so he said to his editors he wanted something more in my sort of style, so she just asked me if I’d like to ink him. That’s how that worked, then I didn’t meet Ed for a few years after that: I was half way through drawing Sleeper before I met Ed, back then it was all through the editor, we didn’t really have much contact until we met physically in San Diego one year, and that sort of started us off. We’re definitely friends, but we don’t see each other very often, and I think I’ve spoke to him on the phone maybe twice in 25 years, and just because he hadn’t heard from me for a couple of days, he was worried and then called me and asked my wife if something happened. So we don’t really need to talk to work together: we started off in the beginning having an editor between us, and now everything’s over email, and we meet up every so often, I’ve seen him over this year for two weeks, we had a week in London and a week in Portland, but before that there was no meeting for five years, and maybe we will meet in five years. But when we are together, it’s very concentrated, it’s all about work, even though we hang out and do other stuff, but that’s where we sort of catch up on how we see work going.
J: For me it’s the same, I’ve only met Ed a handful of times ever, but I don’t really speak to him for work either, because everything goes through my father, and I usually get an email at the end of each book saying that it looks great. Sometimes he’ll email me if I’ve done something wrong, maybe I have to change something. And that was also feeling weird, I was asking myself why hasn’t he come through my dad, or why does he email me directly? (laugh)
S: I mean, we live in England, and Ed lives in Los Angeles, so that doesn’t help either.

And after all these years, are there challenges in creating new stories, with new directions , new styles and setting, while maintaining a central core in pulp and noir themes.
S: I have to say that stories and settings are all Ed, I don’t have anything to do with the stories, I just draw what he tells me to draw. We started working together properly on our stuff, we did a little Batman thing called Gotham Noir, but we didn’t own that. After that, we did did Sleeper as well, but we didn’t own that either, and then a couple of years later we both independently decided we wanted to do creator-owned comics rather than carry on working for Marvel or DC, we wanted something we could control. We started doing it, but it took a couple of years for it to actually be financially successful, especially for Ed. I always made enough money drawing it, the same as I always made drawing anything else, because I was getting something equivalent to a page rate, while Ed never made any money out of it for at least two years, but we were both happy to persevere, we knew it was good and we knew that if we just hung on long enough other people might feel the same. On the long run, however, it’s harder for an artist because you can only do one thing at once, so if it hadn’t made enough money for me to carry on doing it, then I would have had to stop and do something else, whereas Ed didn’t need the money because he was already writing Captain America and other stuff. In the end it worked and we had a sort of brand where people would just buy whatever we did, and especially now that we do graphic novels, we just do what we like, and knock people to buy it so that we can do another one.

In Lucca you are presenting Newburn vol. 2 and Where the Body Was. For Jacob, how did you approach drawing, balancing the obvious inspiration of your father’s work and at the same time creating your own recognizable style. What opportunity did Newburn and That Texas Blood represent for you, in the sense of having the chance to work with different authors and teams?
J: Talking about my style, it just came naturally trying to figure out how to fit the story that we were telling. I think naturally I draw a bit like my dad, because I’ve been surrounded by his work since I was born, but also because we have a lot of the same influences, we like the same artists, we read the same books, so I think that was more of an influence. In the end, I’m not really conscious of trying to go one way or the other, it’s mostly trying to fit the story, trying to get better each time, looking at what I don’t like about my work and fix that the next time.
S: I think we’re both in a similar situation where the sheer volume of pages we draw does not leave you time to worry about stuff like style, it comes out how it comes out, because you’ve got to get that page done that day. I draw about 250 pages a year, my son probably does more than me: it’s not like the French comic artist that does 48 pages every couple of years, we don’t have the luxury of thinking how we would like to draw, it just comes out how it comes out. The only thing you can do is that you might have read a new book and think, I like the way they did that, and you try to incorporate that into your work.
J:Yeah, even very specific small things that most people won’t even notice anyway, but you try and put something new into it.
S: As an example, about 20 years ago, in Hellboy, Mike Mignola started drawing little semi-circles on people’s cheeks to define the cheekbones, and I can name like four or five different comic artists that all of a sudden had that in their work, because it was really cool. I did it for a while, Doug Ferrari did it, Jay Lee, Charlie Adlard, quite a few of us ended up catching that little bit. So I think that’s the way both our styles develop, that we look at the same stuff.

Still on Newburn, what is it like for Jacob to work with a writer who is also an artist as Chip Zdarsky. Does it change something in the way of also how you work, is there something different to you?
J: He’s a bit pickier because he’s more tuned into the artwork. When I did something that wasn’t very good, he called me out on it, and made me change it, whereas with Chris Condon on That Texas Blood, he is just happy that I’m drawing the book, and he likes what I do. It’s interesting the different way of working, I think Chip actually left more to me in the scripting, whereas Chris would put more information into the panel descriptions: I think that probably comes from Chip being an artist, and basically wanting to be left alone to draw the page, so he only gives me as much information as I need, and then leaves the rest to me,. That’s the biggest difference between the two.
S: I think it’s the same as well, because Ed obviously used to be an artist when he started out, so he knows, the artist doesn’t want lots of hassle (laugh). Writers who are also artists know to just leave a little bit of space, they’re visually aware, they don’t ask for too much stuff, they make them realize that you can’t ask for impossible things.

Speaking about Where the Body Was, how did this work came about, and especially what was the vibes did you want to convey? This a peculiar work: it’s still a noir but it’s different from all the other things you did, there is romance, there is coming of age.
S: It’s also different because it’s mostly daylight, so we had to draw and color in a different way. A thing that also helped is that the story is set mostly in one place only, in one street, so we built a computer model of it and I could use that to check any angle, draw much more detailed backgrounds that I’ll usually do, because the information is all there. As I was saying, we usually do not have the luxury of planning when we do monthly series, Ed’s usually a few pages ahead of me, as far as writing goes. For this work, he’d written probably 50 pages maybe before I started drawing it (I don’t know how he managed that, he’s never managed it before!), so that made it quite nice that I could think about the whole thing a little bit more.
J: From the coloring point of you, daytime is much much harder than it is night time, because you can see everything, and everything’s the right color. Lot of my coloring, especially the night time scenes, is sort of impressionistic color rather than true color, and it’s more trying to capture a tone rather than trying to make sure everyone’s skin is the right color, and the sky is blue; trying to avoid doing what I would consider basic color in the daytime was really difficult, so it’s like trying to shift things a little bit, and trying to capture that hazy sunny atmosphere of summertime.

And anyway, I would say that some sort of expressionistic tones remain, there is a summer vibe that is also a noir vibe, therefore not 100% realistic in a way. I don’t know if this makes sense.
J: Yeah, I was mostly trying to make it look interesting and also haunted. But again, when you have deadlines, you are mostly trying to figure it out on that first page, and then when you are doing like eight or ten pages a day, you have to make really quick decisions, so you don’t really think about it that much until someone asks a question.
S: Exactly, we never think about any of this stuff until we get interviewed.

Ok, so probably you will not like my next question! There’s a scene in the finale, set after the events of the story, that talks about Tommy’s future. In this one you see the character welcoming his sick wife into bed and hugging her. Everything from the captions to the drawings, the shadows and the blue night color create a heartbreaking moment that I was strongly moved by. How did you work on this scene?
S: Ed is writing from the heart on that stuff, lot of it’s based on his personal. He said in many interviews that a lot of his work is therapy for him, in our work, which is mostly set in the past, there’s a lot about childhood and families, and I think Ed is using the crime story to just hang that stuff on. Regarding the scene, I wanted to make it look how Ed wanted it to look, but I’ve not really had any experience of that sort of thing in real life, so I just had to, try and figure out how to make it work.
J: It’s a weird job, because there’s three people trying to capture one thing through three different lenses.
S: It’s like Chinese whispers, isn’t it, right? Things get distorted further along the chain you go: Ed obviously knows exactly what he means and what he wants, and then his job is to tell me that and make sure I get to do it right, and then from what I’ve drawn and what Ed’s words, Jacob should find out what we want from him as well.
J: And it’s good when it works as you expressed that.
S: Yeah, I mean, if it affects you like that, reading that, that’s what we’re waiting for, but how we get there, no idea. (laugh)

The very last question: is there something new coming out from you, with Ed or even other projects?
S: We’re halfway through a Criminal graphic novel. We don’t do monthly comics anymore, we’ve done  seven or eight graphic novels now, two a year, but this one is a lot longer than usual,it’s going to take me a whole year to draw it. I think I’ve drawn pages, 80 pages so far, so almost halfway maybe, it’s going to be about a 200 page book, hopefully out in time for the TV show starts. And Jacob has loads of stuff.
J: Yeah, mostly unannounced things: I’m working on a new thing with Chris Condon, so that’s what I’m drawing at the moment, I’ve just finished the first issue of that, but that’s not been announced for months yet. I can say it’s another noir adventure story, set in the 1940s.

Thanks Sean and Jacob, looking forward to your new books.

Interview realized at Lucca Comics and Games 2024 on November 3rd.

Sean Phillips
Drawing comics professionally since the age of fifteen, Eisner Award winning Sean Phillips has worked for all the major publishers. Since drawing Sleeper, Hellblazer, Batman, X-Men, Marvel Zombies, and Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, Sean has concentrated on creator-owned books including Criminal, Kill Or Be Killed, Incognito, Fatale, The Fade Out and Reckless. He is currently drawing a new volume of the long-running Criminal series written by his long-time collaborator Ed Brubaker and coloured by his son Jacob Phillips.
He lives in the Lake District in the UK.

Jacob Phillips
Jacob Phillips is a comic artist and colorist residing in Manchester, UK. He has been drawing his whole life, self publishing first comic, ‘Roboy’, at the age of 11 and selling it at Brighton Comic Con. Today he is the artist on That Texas Blood with writer Chris Condon and Newburn with Chip Zdarsky as well as coloring projects such as Reckless, Criminal and Madi.