Delgado, Ricardo

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Delgado, Ricardo

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Dark Horse Comics, 10956 S.E. Main St., Milwaukie, OR 97222.

CAREER: Comic book artist, illustrator, storyboard artist/conceptual designer for films.

AWARDS, HONORS: Eisner award, for Age of Reptiles.

WRITINGS:

(Illustrator) Robert C. Welch, Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs, Price Stern Sloan (Los Angeles, CA), 1991.

Age of Reptiles: Tribal Warfare (collection), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1996.

Age of Reptiles: Carnivores #1 (limited edition lithographs), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

Age of Reptiles: Carnivores #2 (limited edition lithographs), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

Age of Reptiles: Carnivores #3 (limited edition lithographs), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

Age of Reptiles: The Hunt (collection), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

Age of Reptiles: Carnivores (collection), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

Age of Reptiles: Carnivores #4 (limited edition lithographs), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1998.

Creator of comic book series, including Age of Reptiles and Hieroglyph; storyboard artist for films, including Species, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Speed, Men in Black, Tomb Raider, Dinosaur, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions.

SIDELIGHTS: Ricardo Delgado is an artist whose first comic book was his award-winning Age of Reptiles, a full-color series inspired by his own fascination with dinosaurs, and one that consisted entirely of art and is appropriate for all ages. Mike Richardson, the founder of Dark Horse Comics, offered Delgado the opportunity to draw a series after being impressed with the artist's work. Dark Horse published four limited editions of Delgado's dinosaur lithographs, signed and numbered by the artist, and Age of Reptiles has been collected in several volumes, including Age of Reptiles: The Hunt, in which a young Allosaur crosses Jurassic North America to escape the pack of Ceratosaurs that killed his mother.

In Age of Reptiles: Tribal Warfare, a Deinonychus band steals the eggs of a family of Tyrannosaurus rexes, who take revenge as the thieves concentrate on eating turtle eggs by the sea. The action picks up when an Ichthyosaur rises from the watery depths to join the fray.

Delgado's next series, Hieroglyph, features monsters and archeology. In an interview with Delgado, a Dark Horse Comics Online contributor said to him that in Hieroglyph, "you have a character who travels to another planet far on the other side of the solar system, and he encounters not only the contemporary lives that populate the planet, but he also learns a lot about the history of their ancestors. It's a neat setup for a science fiction comic." Delgado, who said he was influenced as a child by reading National Geographic and watching films like The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, replied, "there is a whole back story there that you can sort of vaguely figure out, which is all I want. I just want people to read this and say, 'You know there is a really unique history to this planet that might sort of resemble our own.' There are these ruins and fish mummies, and cool stuff, and there are mosaics that show people with cool robes and octopus heads."

The hero of the story is Francisco Chavez, an intellectual who has left his family to explore and chart the planet. Delgado notes that Chavez misses his family very much, "cries for them, and that is based on my love for my family…. I want my characters to be that well developed, so that you see their emotions and know them more deeply as a person and a character."

Delgado is also a storyboard artist for films, particularly action/adventure films like sequels to The Matrix. In an interview with Redpill for Whatisthematrix online, Delgado said that Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski are comic book fans and have comics in their backgrounds, "so they try to get a comic book feel for their stories; that's why I'm here." The interview was conducted as Delgado was working on The Matrix Revolutions.

Redpill asked him to compare the art departments of the Matrix project and Men in Black, to which Delgado also contributed. He said that for Men in Black, he "was on very early in that film and did a lot of design work, leaving before the production actually started. So this is similar in the sense that we're working really early and developing ideas, even though we're supposedly making a movie in about six months or so, and I'll be leaving the show before the filming starts. That's sort of the role of the illustrator in film, you work on a film and a couple of years later … you see this thing on the screen, and that's always really interesting, sometimes to your enjoyment and sometimes not." Delgado said that this was the biggest film he had ever worked on, "a gargantuan story which needs to be designed and told."

Delgado told Redpill that he saw the first Matrix with his wife at her urging and didn't know anything about it except what he saw on the promotional poster. He said that "when you don't expect or know anything about a story, and you come in and it kind of floors you like that, watching the film for the first time … it was a real treat. And now, a couple of years later to be working on it is really cool. It doesn't get better than that."