Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  I understand that feeling of awe. When I was nine I saw the Van Gogh exhibit when it toured through San Francisco and I agree that it's one thing to see a print of something and quite another to see the individual brush strokes.

  These people made the pieces for you to experience one-on-one. It was a one-on-one conversation they were having. The subtlety of that gets lost because we are so used to reproductions these days.

  You have such a wonderful understanding of the subtleties of light and shadow. There is a “softness" in your work. Was that something where, in the early part of your training, you said "This is an area I want to focus on and at which I want to excel"?

  No, absolutely not. I discovered that probably as the people looking at my work have. I didn't really work at any aspect. A lot of what you see, the paintings that I've done from photographs, has been a kind of finding out what the filter of myself turns this image into, rather than trying to make something happen. It's a matter of discovering what it is that's happening as it's happening. It's just a quality that you're recognizing in that particular distillation. So, I certainly haven't worked at it, that seems forced or manipulative. I really wouldn't want to do that.

  You do a lot of showings in galleries. Do you see the work you do for those shows and the work you do for comics as distinctly different?

  No. I used to. I used to try to be very schizophrenic about it, and certainly there's a place where they stop being two different kinds of things and just simply became what it is that I do and where I am at the moment and what kind of imagery or stories I want to offer. When I did M, that was the place where I said "Well, this really can be in a gallery if it needs to be, or it can be in a book." Although I do sometimes sell pieces through galleries that have been in stories, I tend to think of that as selling a section of something rather than selling an entire piece.

  Based on the fact that you have your feet firmly in two different worlds, Fine Art and Comic Art, how would you typify an average Jon Muth fan?

  [laughs] I think there are seven of them and I generally take them all out to dinner at the end of the year: college students, art students, collectors. I am constantly surprised by who it is and I often meet them at the convention I tend to go to in San Diego. I've made some very good friends this way, being introduced to them through their experience with my work. I sell work to people that go to the symphony, people who are fifty or sixty years old, and I sell work to much younger people. I guess I don't know if there is [a typical fan]. I've thought about this lately, although I'm kind of glad I don't know. If I did know, I'd be able to say "Well, gee, they'll be expecting that" or "Maybe I would surprise them if I did this". I guess, like most people making work or making things up, I tend to be speaking to people that are sort of like myself.

  Is your first consideration when doing a project to please yourself?

  Well, each project has a different set of circumstances. I would say that the stuff that I do is done because I can become enthusiastic about discovering what it is I can say about this project. Like with M, the editor, Steve Niles, brought it up to me and said "We have M to do" and I grabbed him by the lapels and said "Don't give this to anybody else. I have to do this book." Before that moment I would not have had any idea that it would be the next thing to do, but as soon as he said it, I just had this flash of having to do it. That had a certain circumstance to it. I had an idea for the way the book ought to be done and I wanted to set it in motion and find out what would happen. I did just do a small book that I am very happy with called Stonecutter which was something that I originated and then took it to a publisher. It's written by John Kuramoto. I am very pleased with that book philosophically as well as aesthetically. It's a Taoist tale and it's all ink drawings.

  Tell me a little about Mythology of an Abandoned City.

  It was originally serialized for Epic. It was re-released by Tundra with a new silent piece at the end [called "Statues In The Rain"].

  That piece was so incredible because you went through and told this entire story with only a single sentence used as dialogue. I'm wondering about you tipping your hand by saying "The following is a dream." Was that something that you felt was necessary to "set the stage" or did you go back afterwards and say "Well, I better clear this up"?

  I don't think I was trying to set things up. The line was necessary to facilitate the open-endedness offered by the Laing quote at the end.

  I love the look of Mr. Walker. Tell me how he came to be.

  I don't know. He was just in my head. I don't know how he showed up. I was thinking of a Pierrot, some kind of a man dressed up as a phantom clown. Beyond that, he's just one of the group of people that inhabit my psyche someplace.

  At some points he comes off very friendly but very malevolent at the same time, is that a personal feeling on clowns?

  Oh, clowns have never been funny to me. [laughs] Does anybody know any funny clowns? I only know scary ones, so yes, probably that has something to do with that. I hadn't thought of it before.

  How did you feel about the impact that Moonshadow had on the market when it was first released?

  I know we got some wonderful responses from people. The book has had a wonderful life. People have been very moved by it, in ways I couldn't possibly imagine. So, I think of it as a successful book in a lot of ways. Some people come to me and tell me that it was as influential at the time as Watchmen or Dark Knight and I know, in terms of numbers, that's not true. Then again I hear stories of teachers saying "I've gotten kids to read because of this book" or just quite wonderful, lovely, utterly undeserved kinds of stories. Moonshadow is a kind of mystery to me. I leapt into that without any sense of what I was going to do.

  I am very curious about the plotting of Dracula. What was the thinking behind your presentation? Was it intentional, based on the size of the original, to hit only the highlights of the story?

  I wanted to use the fact that people already knew so much about Dracula. That seemed like a pretty main tool and there was no reason for me to re-iterate a great deal of what was already in our culture and understanding of the vampire. I spent a lot of time talking to people about vampires and about their feelings about Dracula and I would hear from different people "He would have to have extraordinary eyes" or "He would have to have these amazing hands" and I realized, after a few weeks, that there was just no way that anyone could ever draw him. That was the crux of how to do it. It kind of grew out of that understanding. I just used essentially the book and a couple of films and what were salient parts of those. Did you see the latest Dracula film? When I saw the trailer, before it came out, people were saying to me "God, somebody's filmed your Dracula." When I saw it, I realized why I had taken out so much. There was no point to a great deal of it.

  I notice that you quote other works and authors in Dracula. What was the reasoning behind that?

  It was just parenthesis. I could have done a book of vampire imagery and just done quotes and had the book come out the way I would have wanted it to, but it probably would have been too abstract for most people.

  Based on the fact that you have done Dracula, would you ever consider doing a book of Frankenstein or some other icon?

  I don't think I'd do Frankenstein. I thought it was an OK book, but...I guess I feel like I've known some vampires.

  The real kind or the "psychic" kind--the ones that drain you?

  Would I say psychic? Yes, the kinds that are dealing with something much different than bloodletting, but something nevertheless as life draining, something just as passionate, just as mysterious, just as frightening, and just as alluring.

  Why did you lay out some of the dialogue as a script?

  I couldn't think of another way to do it and I didn't want any balloons over their heads, that just seemed the anti-thesis of what I wanted the book to present. It needed to be without balloons, but you needed to know who was talking. It also gave me wonderful things I could do that I'd never seen done in comics. There is a scene
in which Lucy goes to meet Dracula before they leave together and in the stage direction I was able to describe what she was going through. You can do that, these are still pictures, and in the middle of this dialogue I was able to say "she ran her finger across the back of a chair" and by doing that, you know what she's thinking. I was startled by how effective that was.

  Moving on to Meltdown. When this first came out, I was a little puzzled as to how your name got involved. Your work always seemed too soft and sensual for these characters.

  The way the work was divided up was that I did all of the art work involving Havok, and Kent Williams did all the art work involving Wolverine. So, I did do the love story. It was really fun. I'm still very proud of the car chase in the first issue of that. I think that may be one of the best comic book car chases I've ever seen. I wanted to do super heroes and cars and girls. Dr. Neutron is based on Marcel Duchamp, the artist. I'd like to think his spirit is grinning wickedly about that, somewhere. I don't think very many people got that. A couple of people have come up to me and said "Whose idea was that?"

  Is that a genre that you would ever go back to?

  Super heroes? Well...yeah. Actually, Mark DeMatteis is talking with me about doing something now, but I don't know, the genre I don't think I could go back to. I could find another story to tell that might have some super heroic basis of sorts. We're talking about doing Longshot. If you know Mark DeMatteis' work, he's a very good writer. I might do something like that. It would depend upon the story.

  Let's talk about the M book. I'm guessing that you shot photographs for all the panels?

  Yes, about 99.9% of them are from photographs that I took.

  So, with a camera, you basically re-shot the bulk of the film?

  Yes, I did re-photograph the whole film using people that I knew. I added parts that weren't in the film. Not very many, I tried to stay pretty strictly to the script. There were places that, now, I wish I had completely re-written. I think that the script is the most stilted part of the book, but the script is from Thea Von Harbo.

  Do you find that a lot of your friends get dragged into these projects?

  [laughs] They did for M. My wife was having a baby shower and we invited all these people over. A lot of men found themselves invited. Barry Windsor-Smith was there, Al Milgrom, Chris Claremont, Archie Goodwin, (it was a sort of "who's who in comics") and Walt Simonson - it was at his house. I made them all put on outfits and sit around the table and talk like a bunch of gangsters and I photographed them in the middle of this party. For the parts that were ongoing, I tried to pick people that I could imagine some place in their secret hearts, they could be the characters. In the case of the main detective, Lohmann, he was a friend of mine's father who owned a flower shop. I would find that these people I was taking photographs of would immensely inform the character. They would just do things that I couldn't possibly have imagined. Without their participation it just would not have been there. It was a great experience to do that. It was also incredibly expensive and amazingly time consuming.

  Are you a big fan of that film in particular and film in general?

  Yeah, I like film quite a lot and I do like that film, although, I feel like it is part of me now. At the time, it was right before everybody was doing something about serial killers. I remember it that way, anyway. When the book came out, it was passé, but when I started, Silence of the Lambs wasn't out. All the different road trip killer kind of movies weren't really out. I wanted to do M because I thought that it was an interesting character study and the form I saw for the story created the tension it needed.

  The Mystery Play. What motivated you to become involved with this project? Was it the chance to work with Grant Morrison or was it the subject matter?

  I didn't really know what the entire script would be until after we had signed contracts, but I had gotten a vague sense of what the story was and I was more enthralled with the idea than the end product. I don't know if I really worked with Grant, because I didn't really speak to him but twice during the whole project. He's just very shy and I am generally shy, and he is in Scotland. Originally it was to be Dave McKean, myself, Kent Williams, and George Pratt doing something that Grant was going to write and then, I can't really remember how it happened, people got pulled into different things and scheduling got kind of confused. I believe Grant then wrote something different. As he began talking about it, it sounded a little like Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Something a little different than what we ended up with.

  One scene in that book that really struck me was God's autopsy. I love the way you illustrated that. The cut between the panel where the first incision is made and then the next page beginning with the smear of red. Even though there was nothing shown, that splash of color got across more than if you had gone on for page after page of dissecting organs. How important do you think moments like that are to an overall story?

  I think they are more important than most editors do. I thank you for that, that was my moment. It was not what Grant wrote... he wanted to see entrails. I wanted to see the Cosmos, to put too fine a point on it. I think those are the apexes that I work for, that's the reason I do this stuff, to find those chances and then take them. Sometimes, they are more successful than others. I probably look for those more than most traditional comic artists do. I just don't see them that often.

  I have given up looking for the perfect film. Now, I strive to find isolated moments that completely work, and just for that moment everything is perfect and where it should be. A comment my wife made was interesting. As a viewer of that scene in real life, once the initial incision is made, that smear of red is all that she's really going to see, because her eye and her mind are going to turn away, and the only thing left on the screen of her mind is that swirl of red. I thought that was what made it so perfect, it's the impression the viewer would be left with. Let's face it, an autopsy is not a fun thing for people to sit through. The fact that you pulled away gave you the visceral punch, but also alluded to the other thing you were talking about, the Cosmos.

  That's very good. That is the way your mind would work. You would pull away.

  I'd like to talk a little about your music. I have the M soundtrack and I really like it. Do you ever plan on releasing something on a grander scale?

  Well, we've done three discs. The M soundtrack may be re-released, but it would probably be a small run just because we've run out of copies of it. I've had a couple of labels offer to put some of this stuff out. I did a disc called Adrift and Salient with Dave McKean. There was a deluxe edition of Mythology of an Abandoned City that had a CD in with it.

  I understand that a lot of the work you are doing is very ambient in nature.

  Yeah, it is. I've worked with cello and violin which was on the Mythology disc along with some synthesizer and various bells and bicycle wheels. I think maybe I will, at some point, do something else, but my time right now is being used up differently.

  What happens to Jon Muth now? What are you presently working on and what do you plan for the future?

  For the last year, I've been working on something for Japanese publisher Kodansha, called Imaginary Magnitude and it's an eight page strip that comes out monthly in one of their manga magazines. It's these surreal dialogues between a father and son.

  So, it hits pretty close to home.

  [My son] is my material.

  Is it a labor of love or do you have this little fountain of material right there?