In the 1990s, writer R.L. Stine dominated reading lists with kid-friendly scary books in his Goosebumps series. And though we are taught not to judge a book by its cover, Stine’s Goosebumps books immediately grabbed the attention of his young market through the beautiful illustrations by Tim Jacobus. The pair were a dynamic duo on the series with Stine writing exciting scary stories for kids and Jacobus pulling them in with brightly colored covers of the monsters they’d encounter inside the pages.

Jacobus recently talked to Scoop about his work on the Goosebumps series. He recounted his journey as an artist, reflected on his work on Goosebumps, and talked about what it’s like to meet fans, charitable contributions from the sales of Goosebumps cover prints, and his other work in the field of commercial art.

Scoop: When did you know that you wanted to be an artist?
Tim Jacobus (TJ): Oh, that’s a good one. I enjoyed doing art my whole life. It starts with coloring books and all that stuff. My dad could draw, so drawing was something that just went on at our house. My father wasn’t a professional artist or anything, he was a pharmaceutical manufacturer, but he knew how to draw and used it as a learning tool. Like if he was going to build a deck, he’d flip over a napkin and go, “Yeah, the deck’s going to look like this.” So, drawing as a form of communication was a natural thing in our house. I didn’t know until I was nearing the end of my high school career that art was actually a sustainable business and was something I could go into. My whole youth was “art is fun, I’m doing this for a good time.” I was 18 before I took my first commercial art class and when I took that, it was like “oh, this is the thing.”

Scoop: How did your professional career start?
TJ: I think we all have somewhat of a similar story: the first pieces that you sell is to your friends and family because they’re the only ones willing to pay for your art. [laughs] Eventually, you branch out slightly further and someone sees one of those pieces of art that you did for a family member, and you sell your first piece. I think I got my first business that came in somewhat consistently...I did airbrush as one of my tools in book illustrations (airbrush was used a lot back in the ‘80s and ‘90s and still today), for a painting on cars and motorcycle tanks. I had a friend who owned a body shop, he’d tell people, “We have this guy, we’ve added this feature to our shop and if you want something painted on your tailgate, Tim will do it.” That really was the structure of learning this has to get done, you can’t take too long on it because this thing has to go out the door because we have another car coming in. It was tough having people looking over your shoulder while you’re working, and it was a lot of different, good exercises that I learned there. It wasn’t until a number of years after I got out of art school where I was able to land that first book cover.  

Scoop: How did you get involved with the Goosebumps series?
TJ: I worked with Scholastic Books for a couple of years prior to that; I had done a number of book covers with them. Maybe half a dozen covers; no series work or anything incredible. But, I liked them, they liked me. I got my work done on time; my work was consistent. When Goosebumps came along, I wasn’t involved in any project. I think they were looking around for who was available. I hadn’t done any kid-horror stuff up until that point, but I had done some kid fantasy stuff, some outer space things, couple of fantasy pieces for the kid market. They figured maybe it would be a good fit for this. If I had been working on something, I wouldn’t have been considered for it. Lucky I wasn’t busy, I was kind of standing in the right place at the right time.

Scoop: Did you read the books before creating the cover art?
TJ: The only book that was done was the first one, Welcome to Dead House. They gave me the first couple of chapters. After that point, R.L. was writing the book at the same time that I was doing the cover. He would tell me the title – because that’s the way he works, he doesn’t start any of his books until he has a good title – then he would give me a couple sentences, if I was lucky I got a paragraph, and I would work from there. That, actually, was great. Less information for me is better than too much information. I get compelled to put in too many details. You give me a 1,000-page book and it describes everything in crazy detail, I will do my damnedest to get every detail in. You give me three sentences and I get to do whatever I want. Hopefully, we’re aligned when we get to the end of the process.

Scoop: Did R.L. Stine or scholastic give you input on designing the covers or were you free to create what you envisioned?
TJ: It was very collaborative. I had more freedom with the Goosebumps series than I had with anything else I worked on. I worked with a specific art director, R.L. gave a few specific sentences, and I would do three sketches. If the art director had something she felt strongly about, she’d suggest it and I would make sure I did what she asked for, then the other two were my ideas. She was way cool, it wasn’t like “My ideas are the greatest, yours are secondary.” It was three ideas presented to the other art directors and editors and they would pick one.

Sometimes they would like the background in the second sketch and the character in the third sketch and ask if I could put those two together. Obviously, the answer was “yes.” There was never a time when they didn’t like any of the three sketches. When they made a suggestion, I didn’t have to do the sketch and hand it in and have them approve it. They’d say, “Just do that on the final art.” They’d let me do the final art, no one was looking in on it part way, I’d finish and send it over. I literally did 100-plus Goosebumps covers and less than 1% of the time I had to fix something. And, that’s not how it works. Usually everyone wants to say something or change something or add something. It was the closest thing to doing my own thing that you can have in the book business.

Scoop: For those three sketches per cover, do you recall any sketches that you really wanted to use, but they chose a different one instead?
TJ: Maybe if you asked me that question 30 years ago. [laughs] I know I never felt so strongly that I was sitting at home going “Damn!” I always liked all three. There were ones I liked a little better or I could see it in my head how the final was going to come out a little better than the final one, but no, I always liked all three. And if there was something in a sketch that got left behind, a specific way of doing something, I would keep it in the back of my mind. The one we didn’t get to do we could still put that in something that’s coming up in the future and just change it up to match the story.

Scoop: Since the Goosebumps series was aimed at Middle Grade readers, what was your technique for making attention-getting covers that weren’t too scary?
TJ: Well, I’m a big chicken. [laughs] As a kid, I was not a horror fan. I said this at other times, I was the kid who would call his mom and say “come and get me” at the movie theater because I couldn’t sit through the whole movie with the rest of my friends. So, I think I brought that timid thing to the illustrations, to know what I thought was too scary as a kid. I know what we were trying to do. Early on, I noticed with R.L.’s stuff that not only was he giving the kids a little bit of a scare, he was always trying to get a little bit of a laugh too. With titles like Say Cheese and Die, you go “Okay, I get this.” Let’s keep this light, and maybe do horror and humor together. I always knew in the back of my head we weren’t trying to create nightmares and scare a bunch of 9-year-olds into their parents’ beds. I tried to keep it light, and the light part was my own sensibilities.

Scoop: Did you have a preference between the covers that had one point of focus like Night of the Living Dummy or something with multiple focal points like Say Cheese and Die?
TJ: I always was thinking if I can hammer the idea home with a single image, that’s always the best. Art has a lot of the same qualities that joke writing has: if you have too much nonsense going, that’s not a good joke. You keep cutting it down and cutting it down, so it’s set up and punch. If I could make it happen with just the isolated image, I’m working for that. And then eventually, the nice background stuff you drop in enriches the story. Even A Night in Terror Tower, although it has something going on in the background, that’s still a single image. The Haunted Mask 2, the porch is there and there’s stuff going on, but it’s still a single image. I was trying to do that all the time. I think the secondary images were only there to enhance that single image.

Scoop: That Night in Terror Tower is such a great, menacing cover.
TJ: [Laughs] Again, great story. Every time R.L. handed me a new project, it was going to be something brand new. New monsters, new kids, new location. Everything was new. It was like opening a present. It was like “Alright, what do we get to do this time?” Night in Terror Tower that guy, I was like “Yeah, I can sink my teeth into this.”

Scoop: What was the most challenging thing about creating the Goosebumps art?
TJ: I’m going to say the turnaround time. It fell more on R.L. than it did on me, he needed to crank out a book a month. We were on a schedule that “on this day the art has to be done” and “on this day the art goes into production,” “on this day the books are on the truck.” It was this classic 30-day cycle. There was no dropping the ball. You can’t fall behind; you can’t have too much trouble. Although, my part of that one month cycle, I could do comfortably in a week or 30 hours-ish. I could take on other jobs during the month and not risk messing up the main thing, which was to get the Goosebumps stuff done on time. I never had a problem coming up with ideas. The stuff that I got from R.L., even though it was just a handful of sentences, I knew where I was going. I never sat there thinking, “this one’s hard, I have no idea what to do.” Stuff was constantly popping into my head. I probably had more trouble just picking three. I’m sure there were times when the deadline was hard, and I got whiny. But, for the most part, the whole thing was pretty good.

Scoop: Which ones are your favorites?
TJ: I have said my paintings are kind of like family members or however you want to refer to it. I have an affinity for all of them. I like the heavy hitters, meaning the ones people gravitate towards and talk about more. I also like the ones that are a little bit more obscure that people don’t talk about very often. I’m a big fan of Egg Monsters from Mars only because when it was described to me, I was thinking, “I don’t know what’s scary about an egg. This is going to be tough.” It all worked out and I could see the cool part. Another one is The Blob That Ate Everyone just because when I got done with the sketches, all the blobs I drew in pencil color looked like baked potatoes. There’s nothing scary about baked potatoes. Not until we started to add colors and the details did I go, “Okay, okay, we’re safe.”

Scoop: When we met at Fan Expo Philadelphia, I witnessed several people in their 30s and 40s getting very excited to see you and your art because they grew up on Goosebumps. What’s it like for you to experience that and interact with fans at cons?
TJ: It’s the coolest thing, I can’t impress on people enough. When Goosebumps was popular in the ‘90s I did a couple of book signings and Goosebumps presentations at schools. All the Goosebumps fans were 8, 9, 10, 11 years old. I was a 30-something-year-old man. We could talk, but not really. I was still an adult, and they were still kids. I’d talk more to the parents than the actual fans. Now that they’re all grown up, I’m getting the stories that they wanted to tell me back then, but they didn’t have the wherewithal. Grownups are talking about it, not like it was a silly thing they did as kids. The fondness of it is very heartfelt. The smiles, all of it is just great. All of us artists, it’s not like acting or being a musician where you get some sort of response from the crowd. There is no crowd. To get feedback and go places and have con promoters invite you to their shows, to know that there’s going to be people who show up and want to talk to me – it’s mindboggling.

Scoop: I can imagine it’s interesting that the kids from the ‘90s who are now grown up can convey to you their feelings about the series.
TJ: It’s wonderful. Again, a 9-year-old would say, “I love Goosebumps and this is my favorite one.” That would be the extent of the conversation. Now, you get heartfelt stories like “when I was 9, my parents were fighting, and Goosebumps was my escape.” You get some deep stories. I didn’t think of that, I didn’t think of any of this. It’s nice that it’s come this far, for me, in this later part of my career. That was a cool thing that we did 30 years ago, and people are still fond of it. We accomplished something here.

Scoop: I can tell you personally that Goosebumps was my gateway into becoming a voracious reader and I still have all my books.
TJ: Hang on to those, some of them are becoming valuable.

Scoop: Aside from Goosebumps, what are some of the book covers you are most proud of creating?
TJ: Wow. My first covers were for a science fiction company called DAW. He was the guy who saw that weak portfolio at the beginning [laughs] that kind of looked like a kid who just got out of school, and thought I had something and let me do a couple of covers. To see them now, I think, thank goodness for this guy, because when you’re trying to get started, it’s a catch-22. Nobody wants to give you a job until you’ve proven you can do a cover, and you can’t prove that until someone is the first to take a chance on you.

Once I had a couple of jobs in my portfolio, I could say, “Mr. Wollheim at DAW thought I was legit and I got my work done on time, and they got published.” Those are ones I’m really proud of. I know this sounds like a terrible cop out, I’m not sad about any of the stuff I’ve done. I was never forced to do something that I didn’t want to do. I have pieces that, maybe, I could’ve done better on, but they’re cool, they’re all out there. It’s part of the makeup. Even on the jobs that I thought I could’ve done better on, I learned something and you bring that education to the next job.

Scoop: Tell me about Jacobus Studios and the work you do there.
TJ: Jacobus Studios is the blanket name over the top of the company. I continue to do illustrations, there’s always an illustration on the board, but it’s not 100% of what I do. That’s for a couple reasons. In the ‘90s there were thousands of paperback covers that came out every month, and now people are entertained in many, many different ways, so there’s a lot less paperbacks that come out. I still do book covers.

Surprisingly, I do more vinyl album covers now than I did back when vinyl was the chief way of listening to music. I have done some game stuff, magazine things, very diverse stuff. I also am an art director for a small company. We do storyline animation. Don’t think Disney, think PowerPoint on steroids. It’s corporate stuff, we’re teaching people, but we try to put a little flair in there, some humor, and interesting graphics. Also, under the Jacobus Studios umbrella are the Goosebumps prints. We sell prints of some of your favorite Goosebumps covers. We’re adding new ones all the time. And the con business, that also falls underneath Jacobus Studios.

Mostly what I do is this [laughs] there’s not a lot of sitting with my feet in the pool. It’s what I like. As I get older, I get busier. I have friends who are lucky enough or their lives are different, and they’re already retired. They’re doing this, and that – there isn’t a chance I’m retiring. If anything, I think I have to work this Sunday. No sign of me slowing down yet.

Scoop: You mentioned having Goosebumps prints and sketches on your website. Also on the site, it states that $10 from each purchase goes to feed those in need. Can you tell me more about that?
TJ: This started during the pandemic. Everybody got the same scare at the same time, everything shut down, we’re all sitting at home, we’re all unsure of how much of our business is going to be affected. Some of us were smacked square in the face, and for some of us, it didn’t change much. I was one of the people on that latter side. Business changed some, but I stayed busy the whole time.

But, you’re watching more TV than you usually would and you start seeing people lining up at food banks and the common thread to all that when they were interviewed was that they’d never done it before and it was the first time in their lives they had to look for help. There were interviews where I went, “Wow, I wish I could do something.” It was as good a time as any to invest in prints. It’s a little bit daunting, it costs a lot of money to get a decent number of prints. I shot from the hip and decided to sell the big ones for this much and the little ones for this much and give $10 to charity.

So, it’s not actually a charity, there’s a foodbank one mile from my house. At the end of the month, I go through the invoices, count them up and put a zero on the end of that, then order food through Walmart who delivers it to the house, and my son and I load it in the back of the pickup truck and take it over to the foodbank. So, it’s 100% of that $10 is spent on food and makes it down the street to the food bank. If you look at my website, there’s a photo with one box in the back of my truck. Now the last batch, we had to throw some extra bags into someone else’s car. It’s all great, the people at the food bank are thrilled. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep going and growing at it. It’s a good thing.

Scoop: What advice would you give to artists who want to work in commercial art?
TJ: Couple things. First off, don’t be over concerned with where your art’s going to go. Don’t think, “I’m definitely going to be a book cover artist” – stop that. Just be the best artist you can be, because everything is changing so fast. I don’t know where your art’s going to go. There’s going to be a new business every two years. There’s going to be some new form of entertainment, some new business, some new place where you can put your art. Don’t be overly concerned with where, be concerned with the quality.

My second piece of advice is don’t give me the nonsense that “Oh, I have to wait until I’m inspired. I have to wait for my creative juices to flow.” Knock it off. Art is like everything else, if you want to get better, you have to work at it. You have to carve out time every day to work at it. I don’t care if it’s 15 minutes, but consistency of doing it every day, of making it a habit will make your art grow so fast, you will be surprised. Even if the time you are spending is very limited. There’s something about it clicking in your brain better if you are doing it every day, there’s something about muscle memory that if you were doing it yesterday, it doesn’t take long to pick it back up where you left off. Treat it seriously. This is as important as brushing your teeth, do your art every day. 

Scoop: What projects are you working on now?
TJ: I have a couple of them, and one of them has an NDA involved, so I can’t tell you anything other than if you are signing NDAs it’s a company that if I said it, you would know it. I’m doing three pieces of art for them, I’ve never worked with them before, so I’m excited about that. The other I can give a little more information. Here’s something that I learned, there’s magicians who do card tricks, and they use specialized cards to do their tricks. Someone who is a manufacturer of those cards – one of the big deals in the card business – he is putting out a special edition card at Halloween and we finished that art recently. It’s going to be cool, but I can’t tell you the name of the company or what’s going to be on the card.

Scoop: Do you have any other convention appearances in the next few months?
TJ: This year I’ve been a lot more aggressive in cons. There are a whole bunch of dates available on my website.

Scoop: Well, that’s all I have for you, I really enjoyed talking to you.
TJ: Thanks, Amanda, it was nice to meet you at Philly and I’m glad that we were able to follow through on this.