Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  So, you knew right out of the gate what you wanted to do.

  I was fortunate. I knew from a really early age that this is what I wanted to do. I couldn’t not draw. Any spare moment I had I was drawing. While whatever friends I did have were out playing baseball or football, it was just my passion to sit and draw. It’s hard when you’re a kid and other kids don’t have that sensibility or that interest, because the majority of young boys are into baseball and football. While I enjoyed [sports], drawing was a passion. I’ve told people before, if I went out and played ball every day, I don’t think I’d be playing for the Yankees today, so I guess I made the right choice.

  Someone once mentioned to me that you, for a time, were a police officer.

  Yes, I was a New York City cop in the early-to-mid eighties.

  Did that have any impact on your work?

  Not really. They were two separate entities. I had two interests when I was a kid: one was art and the other one was being a cop. My favorite TV shows were NYPD and Police Story and stuff like that. I had broken into the art field right out of high school. I was kind of lucky. I met Howard Chaykin and became an assistant for about six months and, in that time, sold a cover to Heavy Metal and then I did some work for Marvel, but I wasn’t making a whole lot of money doing it back then. I didn’t know a whole lot and, looking back, I’m amazed that they actually paid me for some of the stuff I did. It’s really awful. I and a few of my friends had taken the police test, were like eighteen years old, and a few years later they called me. At the time, it seemed that since I wasn’t making that great a living doing the art, I would take the police work since I had a big interest in it anyway. I would do that full time, and whatever spare time I had, I would do some freelance work on the side. Then, when I retired, go back into art full time again. That was the plan at least. After about two or three years, I realized that art was really what I wanted to do.

  I would think that would have a really big impact not only on the way you looked at people, but on the way you looked at any given situation, seeing the drama there.

  I grew up as a street kid from the Lower East Side, so when I was a cop they stuck me into the type of neighborhoods and economic environment that I grew up in. I could really relate to the people I was dealing with on a day-to-day basis. I worked in Fort Apache up in the South Bronx. Being as how I wasn’t totally alien to the way those people were living, it didn’t have that much of an impact, it didn’t change me that much or open my eyes to too much that I hadn’t really experienced already. It did make me a lot more compassionate toward the people that I dealt with than the guys I worked with who came from Long Island and had never experienced that before.

  Was making the decision to leave that field a difficult one?

  It’s pretty scary because [I was] giving up security and stability and going into something that I wasn’t sure I was going to succeed at. I mean, I had gotten some work when I was younger and I knew I was lucky to break in that early. If I’d broken in today, at the same age, knowing what I knew then, I wouldn’t get any work because the entry level talent has risen so drastically in the last ten years so that some of the guys coming in, just breaking in, are just incredible.

  Well, you’re no hack yourself... [laughs]

  Thanks. I was talking about back then. If you look at the early work, I was really in the learning phase. I had never had a painting lesson. I was teaching myself to paint by trial and error. I was lucky. I was really lucky that the guys who were hiring me saw something in my work that they felt showed promise.

  What can you tell me about the mini-series Cops: The Job?

  Yeah, Larry Hama, who was one of the editors up at Marvel and who was also writing The Nam which was a real popular book at the time, had wanted to do a very realistic police series. Since I was an ex-cop and a friend of his, he called me up and asked if I wanted to co-write it with him. The two of us had talked on numerous occasions about how poorly police procedure and actions had been written in comic books and how illogical a lot of their behavior was. So, we figured that there would be some interest in doing a real life cop drama. We did a four issue mini-series and based a lot of what happened in the books on things that had happened to me when I was a cop. A lot of the characters were based on people that I had worked with. All of the dialogue and technical aspects of the book were completely accurate. We got tons of mail from cops all over the world who were so impressed with how accurate the book was and how realistic the depiction of off-duty and on-duty relationships were. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a super hero book. It didn’t get a whole lot of promotion or exposure and didn’t go any further than that, but I’m really proud of it.

  Did you do the interior art as well?

  No, that was done by Mike Harris. I simply co-wrote it.

  What drew you to the work you did based on the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs?

  Friedlander Publisher Group called me after I had done the Marvel Masterpiece card set and asked me if I would be interested in doing a card set for them based on a "Joe Jusko’s barbarians and babes" type of thing. So, that was the original premise. A little while after that, they had begun negotiating for both the Robert E. Howard and the Edgar Rice Burroughs licenses. Mike Friedlander, who was a big fan of my Savage Sword of Conan covers, gave me a call and asked me if I would be interested in doing either Howard or Burroughs. I don’t know how many Conan covers I had done, but I was kind of Conan-ed out at that point. I didn’t know if I could do much more with the character, but I had never done Burroughs. I’m also a big wild life art fanatic, especially big cats. I just saw this as an opportunity to do a wide array of different work especially because Burroughs went from the Tarzan books to Mars books and the other different science fiction that he had written. I thought it would be a perfect vehicle for me to expand.

  I’d like to ask you about a quote I read of yours. You said, "I find, we, as artists, see things differently than the average person. The power of observation helps. When I go to a movie, I might look at the way the light is hitting an object or where the secondary light source is coming from. What’s strange is that I don’t even realize I’m looking for that. I think everybody sees these details but few absorb them." Do you find that the observation of the artist, at a certain point, becomes so innate that even he does not notice it?

  It takes some training early on. You have to learn not to look at things but to actually see them, that’s one thing that young artists don’t have. When you see samples at conventions, they don’t really see things the way they are in relationship to other objects or spatial relationships. That’s something you have to train your eye to see. You have to learn to see shapes instead of details first. You have to learn to see lighting before you see detail. The way I compose a piece, and the way most people compose pieces who have had some experience, is to block in the major shapes first to get a pleasing composition. Yeah, I tend to look at everything and see how light is hitting it, how it’s reflecting off [of it]. My interest is piqued by details like that, at this point, because I know all of the basics and now there are so many subtleties that you have to pick up on to add some realism to your work, and I think, after a while, it becomes second nature and you don’t even realize that you are doing it. I do it with everything I watch on TV or in the movies. I am constantly looking at compositions, how things are lit, where shadows fall and how they fall, how dark a shadow is on a white object as opposed to a dark object... You start to absorb all of that the longer you do it and, after a while, it does becomes second nature and you don’t even realize that you are doing it.

  Do you find, as an example, in film, that you sometimes get lost in that?

  I’ve lost track of stories sometimes just by examining cinematography, especially old black and white movies. That’s an art in itself, the way those movies were lit. As soon as you colorize them, you destroy all the work those guys did in lighting those movies, because those movies were never meant to be in color. I under
stand the purpose behind that is because young kids won’t watch a black and white movie. So, if colorizing The Maltese Falcon will get them to watch it, then great. You can always turn the color off on it and watch it the way it was meant to be watched. I constantly find myself losing track of what’s going on in movies because I am examining what’s up on the screen.

  Do you also find that movies or TV shows become favorites, basically, because of the way the cinematography is handled?

  Sometimes. My favorite TV shows were always character driven though. My favorite TV show of all time was a show called Wiseguy with Ken Wahl. It was brilliantly written, you really felt for the characters and I could watch those shows over and over again. I have every episode on tape. I think in order to sustain an interest in a show, it has to be character driven. You can appreciate the visuals for what they are, but to sustain interest, there has to be a little more depth than that.

  The point of my question was that I know that I have some favorite films that I know are horrible, but there are these isolated moments that are so cool...

  Oh, absolutely. I’m a big fan of the old spectacle movies. One of my favorite movies is Spartacus because of the scope and the grandeur of it, I love seeing that stuff. Demetrius and the Gladiators, the arena scenes and the Coliseum scenes are just spectacular. To see the panoramas and the composition is just brilliant. I could watch them over and over again just for the detail. So, I definitely agree with that.

  Do you think that an artist must be an active observer at all times in order to make his work ring true?

  I believe that the best artists are. In order to draw somebody sitting down, you have to know the way the body moves when they sit. They sit in a chair, not on a chair. If somebody is standing, knowing where the weight is on the body, as I mentioned before, how shadows fall and where they fall.

  I’d like to get your reaction to the following statement: American comics have fallen short of their potential.

  It goes in cycles. The type of comic that was done in the late eighties to a few years ago is dying out now. One of the things that I found real distressing over the past ten years was that there was a lot of people, because of the growth in the industry in the mid-eighties, that [had forgotten] good drawing ability. And there were a lot of people working who really forgot to learn the basics. They just wanted to break in, and that seems to be changing. There are a lot of really, really talented [people] in the industry now. A lot of guys who were getting by just on riding the crest of what was going on ten years ago have fallen by the wayside and the guys who could really draw are left. In order to maintain the industry, it’s going to have to grow a little bit more and have a little bit more depth to it than it has had.

  Who do you consider to be great artists in the comic field?

  There are a lot of guys I like who are working these days for all different reasons. I like Ron Garney a lot. I think Ron Garney does incredible work. I like Mark Schultz. I like Mike Mignola. I like Alex Ross. I like Alan Davis. Just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m going to leave out a bunch of guys whose work I really admire.

  The Mike Mignola statement is interesting to me because his work seems to be so stark whereas yours is so lush.

  But, again, it’s going back to what I admire about the shadows, the shapes, and the compositions. His work is very, very strong compositionally, mood wise, and volume-wise. He puts in just enough detail to show you what’s going on and everything is accurately drawn. It’s wonderful work. It really is.

  You earlier mentioned The Maltese Falcon. Would you ever be drawn to doing a film noir, sort of a Sin City kind of thing?

  I wouldn’t mind it. You have to do a little bit of everything. I mean you have to [challenge] yourself every couple of years to keep from being bored and to keep other people from being bored with you, which is why I went from covers to trading cards and now I’m doing some story telling for Harris. I’m doing a fully painted Vampirella book for them. That’s something new for me and, I think, it would be new for people who follow my work. After a while, if you see the same thing over and over again, there’s nothing special about it anymore and you can really fall into a rut especially with your own work. You know you can do it so you just routinely chop it out. That’s something I really don’t want to do. I’m too harsh a critic of my own work to fall into that kind of rut.

  Are there any topics that you would never want to address in your art?

  I tend to gravitate away from really sexually explicit material and really excessively violent stuff. I don’t think there is any reason to have insertion scenes in a comic book.

  So, we won’t see you doing a Faust book...

  I doubt that. You don’t really need to see all of that to get it across. I’m doing a Vampirella book now and there’re lots of battle scenes, vampires, and people getting their throats ripped out, but it’s not really graphic. I tend to stay away from that. There is one page where, I guess, I got a little too graphic with some of the violence, but you don’t really need that to indicate what is going on. I’ve seen stories recently with barbarian rape scenes where it looks like a centerfold to Hustler. I don’t think that is really appropriate. I couldn’t justify myself doing that.

  Since the majority of your work is painted, have you ever wanted to dabble in other mediums such as air brush or pen and ink?

  When I broke in, I was doing just about anything to get work. I penciled and inked a few covers for Marvel and I inked a couple of jobs over [pencils by] Mike Vosburg and John Buscema early on, but I tend to see things, at this point, in terms of half tones and shades. I find that if I work in black and white now, I over render everything because my eye just isn’t trained that way anymore. I’ve tried it. I’m just not that comfortable with it. If I had some time to go back and play with it, it might be fun to do, but I’m very insecure about it at this point.

  Do you consider yourself to be a comic artist, an illustrator, or a fine artist?

  I consider myself an illustrator, I guess. I hate distinguishing between fine artists and illustrators because, somehow, if you are an illustrator you’re not an artist. You’re a commercial type machine. It’s all art. Illustration is just art used to sell something or to tell a story. The idea of the angst ridden artist sitting in his studio waiting for inspiration to come is a little passé at this point. Just because you do it commercially, professionally or vocationally doesn’t make you any less of an artist than somebody who suddenly jumps up from his bed one day and starts slushing paint on a canvas.

  If a company came to you and offered you autonomy on your own book right now...a) would you want to write it? and b) what would it be about?

  To do whatever I wanted to do, huh? I’d probably want to write it. If it was to be my personal vision obviously I think I’d have to have total control over it. As to what it would be about? I would have to give some thought to that because there are so many things that I haven’t done yet, so many interests that I have. Off the top of my head... I don’t know. I’ve done a little bit of everything already. I’m really into wildlife art and wildlife conservation, big cats and stuff. It would probably be something along those lines. I’m not sure if it would be incorporated into a fantasy-type setting or it would be a straight ecological type thing, but it would definitely incorporate a lot of those aspects in it.

  You’re doing a lot of work for card companies. Do you find trading cards to be a viable way to get art into the hands of people who wouldn’t ordinarily collect it?

  I found that it works for me, to be honest with you. I collect art cards simply to have these miniature portfolios of all kinds of different people’s work who I wouldn’t normally be able to find. I thought they were terrific as far as getting a large volume of your work into the hands of somebody at a very low cost. That was the main reason I really enjoyed doing them and the reason I enjoy buying them. I don’t collect photo cards. I collect art cards. I have them all in binders and they make great little referen
ce points and portfolios for myself.

  Do you often use those kind of things for..."Oh, you know there was this great thing Julie Bell did that I wanted to look at and try..."

  Every now and then, you get to a point, especially if you’re doing a lot of work, you kind of get stuck and maybe a color scheme will lose you and you’re curious to see how certain colors will work together or you just need to jog your memory because you’ve hit a wall. So, you pull out a binder and just leaf through. You have three hundred to a thousand paintings at your finger tips to just leaf through hoping to get an idea as to how something will work. I find them useful that way.

  Let’s talk a little bit about the work you are doing for Harris Comics. You have, as you’ve mentioned, a fully painted Vampirella book coming out and its title is...

  Vampirella: Blood Lust. It’s a two issue mini-series and it’s due out probably July and August.

  Is there something specific with Vampirella that made you want to do this?

  Absolutely. She was a character that caught my attention back when I was twelve years old. I was always fascinated with the character and something esthetically about the character has always drawn me to her. I had made plans to show my portfolio to Warren [Vampirella’s original publisher] back when I had first broken into the industry and, unfortunately, they had gone under just about the time I was going to go up there and see them. So, I never had an opportunity to work on the character. When the character was resurrected she was one of the first pieces I had done to send out to show that I had an interest. When I finally decided to do some sequential work, she was my first choice. I felt that my interest in the character would sustain me through the months of work it was going to take to paint something of that magnitude.