Brian Hurtt and Matt Kindt at HEK Studios. All photos courtesy of the artists.
Nestled away behind locally owned candle store Webster Wax is HEK Studios—a cool, collaborative art space owned by two of St. Louis’ most tenured and successful cartoonists, Matt Kindt and Brian Hurtt. The studio, located on Watson Road in the tiny village of Marlborough just east of the border with Webster Groves, is hidden behind an unassuming cloth curtain and is a comic shop-sized library containing everything from hip indie comix to prestige Eisner Award-winning graphic novels. Further exploration of the studio reveals bookshelves lined with completed Star Wars Lego sets on the way to the full shipping warehouse, where the two creators store palettes of their collected works and ship projects and artwork directly from a garage space. In the back, Kindt and Hurtt have a sizable board game collection (they joke that in retirement they could open their own gaming space). In the center of the studio there is a comfortable couch and chairs centered around a turntable and modest record collection. Jazz is preferred when they’re working, but ‘90s alternative records like Nirvana’s In Utero and the Smashing Pumpkins box set The Aeroplane Flies High were also spotted.
Most importantly, their respective studio desks line the east and west walls, with everything from fully completed paintings to preliminary sketches hanging on the partitions above their workspaces. A center table next to a couch and chairs features jars filled with hundreds of pencils of every shade and size used to craft their comics. Taking it all in, HEK Studios is a dream creative space: one that any aspiring cartoonist would long to have, and these two creators have worked hard to achieve.
HEK studios is not open to the public, so the invite for The Arts STL to visit and explore the creative space came as a pleasant surprise when a publicist contacted us about advance media for Matt Kindt and Brian Hurtt’s first comic collaboration Fort Psycho, new from Oni Press available Wednesday, August 5th.
Matt Kindt and Brian Hurtt are veterans of the comic industry. Kindt initially broke into popularity in 2012 with his Dark Horse series MIND MGMT, a psychological espionage thriller, and would later go on to collaborate with famous actor Keanu Reeves on the popular series BRZRKR. Hurtt launched his career with The Damned in 2007 and then began illustrating The Sixth Gun in 2010 with acclaimed local writer Cullen Bunn, a series that has been optioned multiple times for a television series but unfortunately failed to get out of development purgatory.
It was serendipitous that Kindt and Hurtt connected as friends and fellow creatives in a city without a large volume of working cartoonists. Hurtt remembers, “I think the origin story goes, it goes back 15 plus years ago. Matt and I were both freelance artists working in St. Louis, and friends, and about once a week, because we both worked in our separate homes or apartments, we’d get together, usually in my apartment, sometimes at a coffee shop or a St. Louis Bread Company, and we would work.”
The idea of a joint art studio formed during long car rides to comic conventions and small press expos.
Kindt explains, “Before we ever shared a studio space, we would drive to conventions. All that travel and driving, hanging out together during all that, we would always talk about the books we’re working on, and about stories and art. Every year we’d drive [to conventions]. I would come with an itinerary. Here’s the things I want to talk about and then brainstorm. So, we would do that drive. And by the time we got back, we had so much figured out. We were working on separate projects, but it felt good to just have somebody else who does the same thing, that knows comics and then you can balance it off each other.”
Hurtt made a point then to emphasize the value of in-person collaboration. “I need real feedback. There’s a little bit of the art school vibe where there’s that friendly competitiveness as well. You kind of push each other. I’ve always found it in the studio space.”
The pair, along with artist Marie Enger, who contributed to The HEK Treasury comic anthology, found an open space in an upstairs loft in downtown Webster Groves to rent in what would become the first incarnation of HEK Studios. With huge boxes of books getting delivered to the second story studio regularly, Kindt jokes, “The UPS guys hated us.” Hurrt adds, “We outgrew the space in the first month of being there.”
After Enger relocated to Chicago, Kindt and Hurtt began looking for a larger, ground-level space to continue their creative partnership. Hurtt continues, “We decided we needed a bigger space, but let’s not throw our money away. Let’s not rent. Let’s invest in ourselves and in [our own] space.”
Kindt’s wife and creative collaborator, Sharlene, is the owner of Webster Wax. The couple noticed an opportunity: the large unused warehouse space behind the candle business could be the ideal relocation for HEK Studios.
Before housing the studio and candle shop the building was home to a bindery where, coincidentally, Hurtt and Kindt had books bound. Hurtt explains, “It’s the same bindery that we got our comic book collections bound at. We’d come here and pick up our books, all of our old comics we had put in the hardback editions.” Now lining the shelves of HEK Studios are dozens of their childhood comic collections bound together for preservation and convenience.
“After that,” Hurtt continues, “I think it was a chop shop. It was sketchy.”
Kindt laughs, “There was a red Porsche back where the kitchen is now when we bought it. That was the only thing in this building other than BB holes in the walls.”
Now the building has operated as an art studio for multiple years and it’s hard to see it as anything other than a vibrant creative space. Perhaps, HEK Studios biggest success story is Kindt and Hurtt’s first official collaboration, Fort Psycho.
“I remember when we came up with this particular story,” Kindt reminisces, “I was sitting in this chair. I was writing out the outline. It was a mole hunt sort of spy story on an island. I wasn’t happy because I thought it was going to be boring to draw. It’s just people on an island talking and interacting.”
Kindt gestures to one of his bound collections of childhood comics on the table, a set of ‘80s Marvel Comics G.I. Joe issues, which he saw as an inspirational spice to flavor his budding spy idea for Fort Psycho. Flipping through the G.I. Joe collection, Kindt observes, “Look at all the color in there, and all the characters, the colorful costumes.”
He pitched his idea across the room to Hurtt, who quickly responded, “If you’re gonna do it like that, then I wanna draw it.”
Having solved the dilemma of who would illustrate this story, the duo quickly went to the studio dry erase board and started story mapping. “We have a gigantic list of names of characters, code names, and everything, and we’re slowly filling in biography about those characters as we go.” Kindt explains.
The in-person collaboration HEK studio allowed for was truly unique. Hurtt elaborates, “Almost page to page, I’ll come to Matt and say, you wrote five panels, but I want to make these seven panels. I want to be able to change this, this viewpoint of the character. Does this work for you? Do you think it works?”
Roughly two years after its inception, Fort Psycho has officially been released. When asked for an elevator pitch, Kindt teased, “The publisher says it’s G.I. Joe meets Watchmen.” Then he elaborates, “It’s a mole hunt on a retired spy island full of psychopathic ex-agents, and one of them is the ultimate bad guy.”
The creators recently returned from San Diego Comic Con after a promotional push for the series in the industry’s premiere expo, featuring novelty “Comic in a Can” Comic Con limited editions of the first issue.
After discussing their careers for over an hour, both creators came to an interesting revelation about how much their shared space contributed to Fort Psycho. “We’ve both been doing this for twenty-five years,” Hurtt muses. “And this is the first time we’ve ever done this, where we’re in the same space, making monthly comics together. It’s cool.”
Kindt also reflects, “I realized when we started doing interviews this year that we’re the only comic book creating team doing a monthly book that’s in the same room together [creating the] book.”
Comics have long presented the romantic ideal of getting to work on a creative project with a close friend as the ultimate career opportunity. In the Kevin Smith film Chasing Amy from 1997, the lead characters Holden (Ben Affleck) and Banky (Jason Lee) are a comic creating team that work in a luxury shared studio. Holden pencils comic pages and hands them directly to Banky at the desk next to him to immediately provide the inks in an imaginative assembly line, all while discussing their respective dysfunctional love lives. The reality of crafting comics was typically much more isolated. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the creative team who crafted the massively popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles famously named their publisher Mirage Studios, as they created their comics on a kitchen table rather than a professional studio. It was only a mirage, well, until the overnight success of TMNT did allow them a real studio. Of course, Stan Lee, the industry’s ultimate mythmaker, invented the Marvel Bullpen in the 1960s, a fiction that still captured the popular imagination about how comics were made by a massive in-person roster of writers and artists churning out work with collective goodwill. However, read any biography on the famously isolated artist Steve Ditko, an alleged Marvel Bullpen contributor, and the myth quickly shatters as he was working from home nearly a half century before that was a common thing.
Still, Hurtt and Kindt have gotten as close as any modern creative team can at making that vaunted myth a reality with HEK Studios. “I don’t know anybody who gets to do what we’re doing,” says Hurtt. “Making comics in the same space. It’s that sort of childhood vision of what it would be like. And we’re surrounded by all these comic books and toys and games.”
Since the duo are now creating their own myths, I asked them to give each other their own Marvel Bullpen names. Hurtt provided, “Madman Matt Kindt. You’re a mad scientist, you got the crazy hair. It’s under control right now,” Hurtt jokes, “but I’ve always described Matt as the mad scientist of comics. Like he’s always messing with them and trying to break them and trying to make something new out of them.”
Kindt then suggests, “Hardworking Hurtt” and his friend laughs. “He always thinks I’m doing too much. Working too hard on any single panel or page. I’m adding too many panels. So whatever that is, that’s who I am.”
With a madman and workaholic running the show, maybe it would be appropriate to rebrand HEK Studios. Perhaps Fort Psycho is a better name now? Heck, the comic was born there. | Jon Osia Scorfina
Fort Psycho #1 By Matt Kindt and Brian Hurtt from Oni Press is available now at your local comic shop today and at onipress.com. Issue #2 follows on September 23. See below for a 7-page preview of Fort Psycho #1, courtesy of Oni Press. Click images to enlarge.
