USC Dornsife philosophy degree sparks alumnus’ career as a comic book artist

The lanky figure of comics artist and graphic novelist Prentis Rollins — no relation, as far as he knows, to punk rock legend Henry — looms into view on Zoom. Rollins, who is 6 feet, 4 inches tall, is speaking from his London home near Kew Gardens. “We can almost see the Thames from here,” he says.

He and his wife, Jacqueline Ching, an editor and fellow graduate of USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — she earned a degree in French and journalism in 1988 (the pair met at USC) — moved to London from New York City eight years ago for an animation job that never saw the light of day.

“It was more an excuse to move to London than anything else,” says Rollins, who graduated from USC Dornsife in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and history. “We’d been talking about living abroad for a long time. It was always going to be London.”

Rollins is currently finishing up illustrations for volume three of The Jekyll Island Chronicles, a sci-fi graphic novel for American comic book publisher IDW, and Forgetting to Remember, the follow-up to his own sci-fi graphic novel, The Furnace (Tor Books, 2018). From a shelf behind his desk, he pulls out a giant stack of drawings.

“There are more than 200 pages here, and that’s just black and white line art,” he says.

Writing a graphic novel is the easy part, Rollins says, taking just two or three months. But then comes the actual drawing of the thing, which by comparison is a long, drawn out slog.

While the art for Jekyll Island Chronicles was done digitally and took two years, all 208 pages of Forgetting to Remember were hand-drawn in ink on paper and took about four years. The digital coloring will take Rollins another year. The Furnace took more than seven years to complete. It’s a process he clearly regards as a labor of love, even if he sometimes rails against the solitary nature of his profession.

That solitude and the vast investment of time required to create a graphic novel mean you have to be sure of two things before you start, Rollins says: A, that the story is going to keep your interest, and B, that it’s watertight.

“Otherwise, if you’ve done 100 pages of art and then suddenly realize there’s a plot hole big enough to fly the starship Enterprise through, it’s all over,” he says.

Persistence pays

Rollins started drawing when he was five or six, growing up with his mother in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

“All kids draw, but most stop when they’re about 12 years old. I was one of the ones that kept going,” Rollins says.

When he was 11, he started drawing comics. The catalyst wasn’t Marvel and DC, but the first Star Wars movie.

“I didn’t draw any better or any worse than any other kid my age, but I just plugged away at it day after day,” says Rollins, a firm believer in persistence over talent.

“There are a bunch of people now who have influenced both my writing and my drawing, but when I was a kid it was just pure expression — which is as it should be.”

USC “by the skin of my teeth”

Rollins’ decision to apply to USC was conceived during a conversation with a friend in their junior year of public high school. 

The friend didn’t apply to USC in the end, but Rollins did. He was accepted, he says, “by the skin of my teeth.

“It was basically academic probation because my high school grades were pretty mediocre. I certainly couldn’t get in now.”

His excitement at being accepted was tempered with trepidation at moving to the West Coast — a place he had never visited. It took him a while to adapt to the laid-back Southern California zeitgeist combined with the academic rigor of USC.

“At USC, for the first time in my life, I was in the presence of people who were genuinely excited about ideas. I’d never experienced that before. I didn’t really have any idea that was possible.”

Rollins focused on studying hard, getting good grades and taking challenging classes. In between studying, he worked 20 hours a week at the nearby California Museum of Science and Industry.

But it wasn’t all work and no play. Rollins drew a weekly comic strip for the Daily Trojan, USC’s student newspaper. Titled “Corb Atomic University” and based on USC, it featured two fictional British-style punks: Abner Cadaver, modeled after the Sex Pistol’s bassist and vocalist Sid Vicious, and Cadaver’s sidekick, Spasmodium Phoul.

“I don’t know how well received it was, but I did get fan mail, so I know some people dug it,” Rollins says.

Following his passion(s)

A professional comics book artist for more than 25 years, Prentis Rollins still has the sketchbook with the first comics he drew as a child. (Photo: Jacqueline Ching.)

Rollins credits professors Janet Levin and Dallas Willard with introducing him to the subject that became a lifelong passion: philosophy. Willard also became a mentor.

“Dallas was a very smart man, he was a very funny man, but the thing that I’ll always remember about him was that he was just one of the most profoundly decent men I’ve ever known,” Rollins says. “You meet two or three people like that in your life, if you’re lucky.” 

By the time Rollins graduated magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he had gone from — in his own words — a mediocre high school student to contemplating a career in academia. He joined a doctoral program at Rutgers University, but the lure of comics proved too strong, and three years later he left to become a professional comics artist.

Rollins worked as an office temp in Manhattan for two years while taking art courses. He landed his first jobs as a professional artist at the grand old age of 27 — a pretty advanced age to be starting in comics, he notes. While he says his philosophy education didn’t help him per se at that point, the rigor, focus and self-discipline he had acquired at USC Dornsife certainly did.

“I worked for Milestone Comics, a partner of DC Comics, nonstop, day and night, for about four years, 12 hours a day, penciling and inking superhero comics. I was having the time of my life, and then after that I started getting work from DC Comics proper, and I worked for them for the better part of 20 years, illustrating titles such as Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and dozens more.”

Asked what he enjoys most about his profession, Rollins responds that there are many things he doesn’t like about it, not least the fact that it requires him to spend so much time alone. He cites famous comic book artist Wally Wood: “Being a comic book artist is like sentencing yourself to life imprisonment at hard labor in solitary confinement.”

But, Rollins says he has no regrets. “I’m doing it for the same reason that beavers build dams and birds build nests: I can’t help it.”

Finding inspiration

Rollins remains an avid reader of philosophy and says the philosophical education he got at USC Dornsife informs and inspires his own work.

“I don’t think I could have written The Furnace without a lot of the ideas that I was exposed to at USC,” he says.

Initially a 30-page short story, written in 1999 for Gotham Writer’s Workshop in New York City, The Furnace is set in New York in 2053. It features a fictional former USC physics professor who develops a new means of incarcerating dangerous criminals by releasing them into society but rendering them invisible and inaudible. The main character, who was involved in a small but crucial way in the development of this technology, is plagued with guilt because of the resulting human tragedy.

The novel contains a lengthy flashback set at USC in 2028.

“I went to great pains to meticulously recreate landmarks around USC, like Hoose Library of Philosophy for instance, and Tommy Trojan,” Rollins says. “I can only imagine that anyone reading the book would pick up on the warmth that I feel for the place.”

A time of growth

Indeed, Rollins says he remembers his time at USC with great fondness, although the years he spent there weren’t happy in the conventional sense.

“It was a period of internal upheaval and homesickness and being very much a fish out of water a lot of the time,” he says. “I never really fitted in that well, but I realized afterwards that it was a tremendously valuable experience and a time of great intellectual and personal growth.

“I don’t know if any other university would have matched up. I just know I’m glad I went there, glad I met Dallas, glad I discovered philosophy.”