John Paul Leon’s sliver of a studio, nestled in the back of his home in Miami’s Coral Way neighborhood, is every comics fan’s dream. Shelf upon shelf bursts with tales of every superhero from Ant-Man to Batman, from the Avengers to Captain America. Yet Leon—the man who helped redefine the Marvel Comics universe with the 1999 – 2000 series Earth X, and whose illustrations grace the current covers of DC’s Sheriff of Babylon and Dark Horse’s The Massive: Ninth Wave—doesn’t spend much time reading them himself.

“I did as a kid,” he says. “I was always partial to Superman.” His high-school education at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, however, was fine-arts focused, and his interest in the medium waned.

His years at SVA reawakened his inner child—and superhero. “When I was a kid I liked the idea of telling a story with pictures,” he says. “That’s what attracted me to illustration.” After graduating, Leon worked in New York for five years, at a time when comics production was still largely pre-digital. “You used to have to FedEx your work, and actually go to the library to do research for scenes or get visuals of cityscapes.”

Leon moved back to South Florida in 1999 and today, with the efficiencies of the Internet age, working remotely has never been easier, or more comfortable. When he’s not in his studio reviewing scripts, sketching, coloring covers or working on Batman: Creatures of the Night, a forthcoming DC miniseries, he’s spending time with his wife and daughter, or losing himself in movies, particularly those of Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. And not just for pleasure.

“A lot of the same rules that apply in film apply to comics,” he says. “It’s important for readers to know where everything is in space in relation to each other, no matter the amount of action happening.”

Spotlight: Miami