Takeshi Miyazawa says working on Spider-Man spinoff Silk made him a better artist

You can't underestimate the power of boredom in creating a great artist, according to Takeshi Miyazawa. When the illustrator — who's brought his own touch to Marvel characters like Spider-Man and Mrs. Marvel — was growing up in the Toronto suburb of Ajax, Ont. in the 1980s, there wasn't much to do other than draw.

"There was nothing there, man, seriously," he says. "It was just farmland, swamps, forests, subdivisions every so often. But that's why I really appreciated that experience, because there was nothing to do, so I would just draw."

In addition to being a two-time Hugo Award nominee, Miyazawa helped change the look of the Marvel universe. In the mid-'00s, he was part of a wave of artists who brought the aesthetic of Japanese manga to western superhero comics with his work on titles like Runaways and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. 

While in his teens, Miyazawa started drawing sci-fi fanzines. One of those zines found its way into the hands of comic writer J. Torres. The two wound up working together on a comic called Sidekicks, which came out on indie publisher Oni Press. From there, he would move on to the big time with Marvel. 

As the son of Japanese immigrants, Miyazawa grew up with both manga and the American pantheon of superheroes, so combining the two came naturally.

"I was mostly influenced by Dragon Ball and other Japanese stuff," he says. "But my older brother had X-Men and X-Force and I would look at his comics. I always found them a little laborious to read with the photorealistic-type drawings and all the text. Comics, to me, should be fun and kind of light entertainment. You should be able to read it quickly and digest it really easily. So I think in a way my drawing style reflects that because it's not too complicated."

That said, he acknowledges that his art has gotten a little less simple over time. He's studied anatomy. The heads have gotten smaller, more proportional, less "cartoony," as he puts it. He doesn't "wing it as much" as he did earlier in his career.

"It's important as an artist to keep evolving," he says.

Miyazawa, who has worked heavily on Spider-Man-related titles, says he keeps getting drawn back to the Spiderverse because Spider-Man "encompasses everything I like about comics."

"He's got an underdog story, right?" he says. "And everybody can relate to that at one point in their lives. The setting is really fun, New York. And it has that theme of youth, which is really exciting to me."

Since 2020, Miyazwa has been drawing Spider-Man spinoff Silk. The titular character, aka Cindy Moon, is a classmate of Peter Parker who is bitten by the same radioactive spider — but unlike Parker, Moon is unable to master her powers until adulthood. Moon is Korean-American, and Miyazawa says drawing the series has made him think about culture, how he approaches designing characters, and his own "Asianness" in a way he hadn't before. He says that previously, comics had been "a safe environment for me to not think about those things."

"I have like, one standard face that I draw, pretty much," he says. "I don't change it much. When you look at my drawings of Cindy early on, I feel like it could go either way. She could be Asian, but you could use her to write a white character. [Silk writer] Maurene [Goo] was quite adamant that, you know, 'You should just do your best to draw her more Asian, maybe stylize the eyes more.' And it was kind of a good wake-up call for me to not generalize. So I've strived to make those improvements in my art as well."

He adds that, since working on Silk, he tries to think of his characters more holistically when drawing them — where they're from, who they are, even what's in their house. Miyazawa says he's always striving to grow as an artist, because he wants to give his readers the same feeling he got from comics as a child and a teenager.

"You know that feeling where you're flipping pages and you're kind of mesmerized by what's there?" he says. "I just never let go of that feeling, and I kind of want to pass that on."

He also wants to pass on some advice to the next generation of artists.

"It's much easier to publish comics now on the internet," he says. "You should think about publishing what you want on your own terms."