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Marcel Thee

“It’s a dream come true,” says Indonesian comic artist Ario Anindito. After many years as a professional cartoonist, this year he began designing elements of the latest chapter in the global Star Wars multimedia spectacular.
The 37-year-old was an introverted child, frequently “daydreaming and getting lost in my own imagination”. At the age of six, he decided that drawing superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman would be his escape, and later his profession.
Today, Anindito is one of a few Indonesians working for Marvel Comics, the publishing company that dominates global pop culture with a cast of world-famous superheroes.
“Every kid who loves to draw, it’s basically our dream to work for Marvel or DC Comics,” he says. “I get to draw characters that I used to watch on TV and in the movies or read about in comics as a kid.”

The artist contrasts this with drawing in his classroom notebooks, getting caught by teachers and scolded for it. “Well, look who’s laughing now,” he says with a mock evil laugh.
From Bandung in West Java, Anindito graduated from Parahyangan Catholic University with a degree in architecture. After a stint at DC Comics, he now works as a penciller and inker for Marvel.
A penciller sketches the first visuals using a pencil to provide an outline of positioning and layouts, which are then discussed with the writer. An inker uses India ink to transform the penciller’s work into finished drawings. A professional who both pencils and inks, like Anindito, is known as a line drawer.
I get to design many things in the Star Wars universe. I designed the look of the planet, the ships, the monsters, the outfit and the Jedi. Man! Tell me that is not a dream come true. It’s so cool, I am still in disbelief
Ario Anindito, Marvel comic artist
While working with Marvel, Anindito also runs Stonefruit, his own stylishly lit home studio filled with collectible toys.
Since he began working with Marvel in 2014, Anindito has drawn for popular titles including Wolverine, Venom , X-Men, Doctor Strange, and the orientally focused Sword Master comics.
He’s known for his highly detailed background renderings and the expressiveness of his characters. It wasn’t until he left DC Comics for Marvel that he began to win his own fans.

Alti Firmansyah is another artist employed by Marvel. Born and bred in Bandung, the 37-year-old has worked on titles including Thor, X-Men, Hulk, Gwenpool and the Marvel Rising series. She feels empowered by the growing number of Southeast Asian artists working in the global comics field.
“I am amazed by the fact. There’s so much variation in our style as Asians, and there are definitely many I consider influences,” says Firmansyah, whose characters are colourful, with vibrant expressions.
After graduating with a degree in graphic design from the Bandung Institute of Technology in 2005, Firmansyah began working as a visualiser at an advertising agency, responsible for helping the senior art director prepare storyboards for client presentations.
By 2012, she says, she felt increasingly stifled by the limitations of her role, so she joined the Jakarta-based comics studio Stellar Labs.

In 2014, she went to a local comic convention, where Marvel writer and editor Chester B. Cebulski was scouting for new talent. Firmansyah had prepared her portfolio before she went to meet the famed professional, now Marvel’s editor-in-chief. She was the first in a long line of aspiring illustrators.
“He reviewed a lot of my local comic work, and gave me a lot of input regarding the good and bad, and what I could do to make them better,” she says.
Four months later, Firmansyah heard from Marvel Comics in the US. The studio gave all Cebulski’s finalists five test pages to pick from and redraw with their ideas. Firmansyah drew four pages of Ms Marvel, also known as Kamala Khan, the publisher’s first Muslim superhero.
She was soon commissioned to work on her first Marvel title, with writers Sam Humphries and Christina Harrington. The comic featured the character Star-Lord (from the superhero team Guardians of the Galaxy, among others).
Like many Indonesians who grew up in the 1990s, Anindito and Firmansyah developed a passion for comics from a mix of Japanese manga comics and European titles such as Asterix and Tintin, before moving on to US comics, which arrived slightly later in Indonesia.

The hodgepodge of influences has resulted in an Indonesian style that has strong characteristics but remains flexible – an important factor for work assisting more established comic artists who have their own particular styles.
“I started drawing with a manga style,” Anindito says, pointing to the influence of popular Japanese titles like Dragon Ball, Kung Fu Boy, and Candy Candy.
“Then I combined it with a US style when I began reading X-Men books, but I never deliberately tried to find my own style. It’s all shaped in an organic way.”
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Firmansyah says she was influenced by manga’s complexity and the way manga villains sometimes win, unlike the criminals in US comics she had encountered.
The success of these two Indonesian cartoonists stands out in a world of ubiquitous superheroes and their creator studios, thanks to movies well-known even to people who have never read a comic book.
The artists’ road was paved by less-heralded names like the late Teguh Santosa, who died in 2000 but had been working with Marvel since 1994 (and making local comics since the 1960s), and Sunny Gho, 38, chairman of the Indonesian Comics Association and chief of the Indonesian publishing company Kosmik, who has worked with Marvel since 2009 as a freelancer.

Gho is excited Indonesia is finally getting its due in the comics world. The recognition will transform both the industry, he adds, and the public’s view of cartooning as a profession.
He hopes Indonesian artists will continue to work for local publishers. “Having too many artists working abroad will deprive our talent pool,” he says.
“The local industry has to work really hard to catch up or else we’ll have to accept our fate of being mainly a servicing and consuming country, not a producing one.”
The lure of international fame might be hard to resist. Anindito and Firmansyah have both taken part in panels at conventions in the US where admirers have treated them as minor celebrities.

Anindito’s biggest moment so far was his recent appointment as penciller for Marvel’s latest Star Wars comic series, Star Wars: The High Republic.
Co-created by the influential Lucasfilm company, the comic has been heralded as a major step in the popular franchise’s direction, taking place 200 years before the setting of the original 1977 Star Wars.
Anindito is working on the series with respected comic writer Cavan Scott (known for his work on Doctor Who, Vikings and Power Rangers) and inker Mark Morales. He says the title will include his most detailed and meticulous drawings to date.
Scott has hyped Anindito’s involvement, telling the tech-hobby website Gizmodo that “the detail in [Anindito’s] pages has been exquisite”, and adding “plenty of what will become the High Republic is straight out of Ario’s head now, which is great to see”.

As a long-time Star Wars fan, Anindito couldn’t be more excited. “I get to design many things in the Star Wars universe,” he says.
“I designed the look of the planet, the ships, the monsters, the outfit and the Jedi. Man! Tell me that is not a dream come true. It’s so cool, I am still in disbelief.” The sheer size of the franchise’s marketing will make the series Anindito’s highest-profile work so far.
Proud of their heritage, Anindito and Firmansyah sometimes inject Indonesian flavours into their work, but always with writers’ and editors’ permission. “I put plenty of Indonesian cultural elements in my work in Atlantis Attacks, and people – especially Indonesians – can tell when they see it,” Anindito says.
Even at this point in their careers, Anindito and Firmansyah are constantly surprised by how much their work has given them. Anindito recalls last year’s signing session at the New York Comic Convention, where the line was “so long”.
“At that event, I got to see all the collectible statues [based on comic characters] that I’d designed, because the company that produces them had a booth there, and all of my work was displayed in their booth,” he says. “It was, again, a dream-come-true moment for me. I guess all those daydreams I had as a kid weren’t useless after all.”


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