#310
WINTER–SPRING 2024
BILL JEMAS’ MARVEL TENURE • REVIEWS: VAN SCIVER, PRUM, TESSLER, PHAM AND MORE• AIDAN KOCH & L ALE WEST VIND IN CONVERSATION • HIV + ME • JESS JOHNSON SKETCHBOOKS KUNZLE, MARESCA AND SMOLDEREN ROUNDTABLE
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GARY GROTH INTERVIEWS SATIRIST/MULTIMEDIA ARTIST
GERALD SCARFE
“IF WE FALSIFY THE WORLD AROUND US, WE ARE DISHONEST TO OURSELVES AND TO POSTERITY.” THE INTERVIEW BY GARY GROTH
just never, ever made it. They could not get outside the Disney box, you know? Everything had to be cute. And, um, I don’t do cute very well.
SCHOOLMASTER
GARY GROTH: You enjoyed the Hercules project?
[Laughs.] No. But if they wanted cute, they wouldn’t have gotten you.
GERALD SCARFE: I did, yes. I was always a Disney fan, but to suddenly get that opportunity to do all the production design was fantastic. But there, again, I did all the designs for over about a year. After that, it was just going around the desk, saying, “You know, those ears are too big and arms too long.” It’s like a schoolmaster, almost, tripping around.
No. People said, at the time, it was strange with my style that they should choose me to do that. And you probably know the story of how it came about. This young student in Chicago, John [Musker], cut my stuff out and put it in a scrapbook. And then years later, after they’d made The Little Mermaid, he found himself extremely powerful in the Disney place. And he was able to make it happen.
Did you enjoy monitoring everyone’s work and providing critiques? Yes. But I felt a little embarrassed because Disney wanted to impose my style on these guys who had a Disney house style. And I found it an imposition, really, for me to say, “You know, it should be like this or should be like that.” We got it working. They were all charming about it and treated me like a grand old man or whatever, because they’re all quite young. So, we had a working relationship. And some guys were able to adapt immediately to my style. Others
Were you pleased with the final result? First of all, I was flattered to be asked to do it, and then pleased with some of the results. I mean … well, there were hundreds of them and one of me. So, who do you think won out in the end? Probably the wickedest characters — like Hades — were the ones that came through. The girl, Meg — I had very little to
Production stylist Sue Nichols’ Hercules Scarfe design guides. From Scarfe: Sixty Years of Being Rude, 2019.
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do with her. She was good. And the guys who do it, they are masters of their craft. They just can make things come alive. They’re still drawings, as we know. You put them together and they not only have a life, but they have a character as well, and then they can express horror or they can express unrequited love or whatever it is. They can do it. The good guys, the top guys. When I was there, it was just when all the CGI was beginning to happen, we used a little bit of CGI. [Stutters, coughs.] Sorry, asthma. The master animators were kings in their world. And they said to me, at the time, they probably would never, ever have wanted for money. But then CGI happened, and all the hand-drawn animation suddenly —
like all adults were, about the war and their children and so forth. My brother wasn’t born until nine years after the war. So, there was no sort of connection there, really. But yes, I suppose you would describe me as a sort of sickly, timid, I wouldn’t say fright — well, maybe frightened, I don’t know. But I had the feeling, with everybody reacting as though I was a very ill sick child (which I was) around them, that it came off on me, you know? And I think that drawing did become my way of explaining the world to myself and putting it all down on paper as best I could. My drawings at that time were not anything like they eventually became. And it was far later that I found that I could express, more correctly, my feelings on paper. It’s still the same now. I can go into my studio and, working in there, I can ease my worries, just the process of working. Maybe that’s the same with all work. I don’t know. Once you’re involved in something, other stuff falls away. I could never, ever have imagined at that time what I have become. Someone who can actually stand up and prime an audience and give a talk, and who could make and can make films. All of that stuff would’ve seemed an impossibility. And I think anybody looking at me at that time would’ve said that that he can’t get there.
Vanished. Yeah. It was a sad thing. And then, of course, followed on from that, very few young animators were learning that craft of hand drawing. It’s come back now. It’s moving in again. In the case of Hades, for instance, you have one master craftsman who sets the style and the drawings and so on. And then he’s got a team that fills in. But those top guys, I really admired them. People say to me, “How can you work for Disney? Is it so cute?” Cutesy and all that. But a lot of Disney when I was growing up, [like] Pinocchio. It’s got some really scary — Stromboli and all of that. And the whale.
Based on what I’ve seen of you in your documentaries and interviews and so forth, you became much more robust.
I want to take you much farther back than Hercules. I was struggling with where to start because your career has so many facets to it. But I’m fascinated by what I would call your awakening as an artist, how you became the artist that you became. Referring to yourself somewhere around the age of 7, 8 or 9, you said, “I don’t think I had a sense at that early point that art would be my vocation. Everybody said I was a good artist, but it didn’t strike me as anything lasting or significant.”
Very difficult, yeah.
Yes. I think I began to develop at the age of 16, because I had a freedom, getting away from my parents, like a lot of kids do, once they escape the family home or start to rebel against the family home. I think I was quite difficult at the age of 16, and probably a troublesome teenager. I began to get stroppy and argumentative and answer back and all that stuff. My mother was a very definite woman. My father was a very gentle, kindly man. He never ever struck me or did anything like that. Although my mother used to slap me — so that was the kind of relationship at home. My mother was very gentle. It was just that she became kind of cross. My dad said she wasn’t always like this. But she was argumentative, and so was I. I was probably an impossible teenager at that time. It’s hard to remember.
— childhood.
Was your mother the more dominant?
It was wartime, which had an effect on the atmosphere at the time. I’m sure my parents were very worried,
Definitely. If you met them, you wouldn’t know. But I think it’s the case in many, many families, actually,
Hmm. Now, you were drawing as a kid a lot. You were asthmatic. You had a very difficult —
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“You Get Me Closer to God”: Explaining Music to Dogs Allee Errico
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themselves, I want these symbols to communicate.” And I’m wondering if you felt yourself countering this or you didn’t even think about that. You were familiar with comics before, so I’m wondering how organically that came out of the way you were working. WESTVIND: I just didn’t know how other people worked, really. I was blissfully unaware for the most part. And that’s why I like those early comics so much. I was drawing something that I was feeling and I wanted the reader to feel, you know? I’m trying to communicate real stuff. It’s not just random detail work. It looks like it could be, though. I don’t know. Everything felt very extreme all the time for me at that point. I felt like I was overly stimulated much of the time. “WATCHING IT HAPPEN AS I DO IT”
KOCH: I was wondering if you scripted things, or at least had a layout in mind of seeing certain things happening before you were drawing them. WESTVIND: [Laughs.] It’s pretty loose stuff. [Laughs], I made thumbnails. Sometimes they’re thumbnails. [Laughs.] In preparation for this, I read a lot of Aidan’s work and I also read as many interviews as I could find, and I watched some videos as well. I know you could pit this talk as “maximalism and minimalism.” Although I don’t really think of your work as minimalism: Aidan works with eliminating information and letting the space decorate the action. And I’m on the opposite end, almost [laughs]. They’re both interesting. But there is something opposed in both of our work, opposing forces. KOCH: I like the excitement of what’s coming next and that kind of momentum while drawing and building things out as you’re going. I never do thumbnails, but I do really loose outlines: “This happens at some point. This happens later, that happens at the end,” and just trying to get there. But the fun part is watching it happen as I do it. There’s so much mystery. WESTVIND: You have this page before you. And maybe you think and sit there for a little while, looking at the blank page [laughs]. And then you slowly make one line and you’re like, “OK, is that it?” [Laughs.] And the answer is no. It’s a very cautious process, almost like stalking? T H E CO M I C S J O U R N A L #310
From The Blonde Woman, 2012.
KOCH: Lots of sitting, staring. WESTVIND: You’re stalking this barren landscape and you just want to see a bit of the bird or something. And then you think, “That’s enough. I’m going to the next page. I don’t want to put too much down.” Or “Oh, I put too much. I gotta take it out.” After reading a lot of Aidan’s work (this is not a critique — but you could read it as a critique), I almost felt like I had been inside a barrel covered in blankets around my head. I’m looking through a little crack in the barrel, so I’m seeing, for instance, a part of somebody’s hand. I don’t hear anything. And then I hear like a few words and I’m trying to piece this thing together. I think the other extreme of that is one of my pages where it’s just, “Oh, I can’t — there’s too much stuff everywhere.” It’s probably exhausting [laughs]. KOCH: It was so nice to read Grip as a book, compared to other work of yours that I’ve only read online. Looking at the full images at once and everything going on, your compositions, how they connect and how the sequences move. Just the energy, having it
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Early work by Koch printed in Arthur Magazine, 2009.
page by page. There’s more of a containment to that, which like was really beautiful to move through rather than scrolling your work on a PDF. There wasn’t that break in turning a page. When you were working on things like The Blonde Woman, Aidan, did you have any expectations for how the readers would interact with it, or if you were just working through things and seeing what would happen. KOCH: I think I was working through things just for me. I was more connected to and had a more specific idea of what the story was than what my readers maybe took away. Things felt very present and emotional, especially the earlier stuff where it’s kind of emo. That’s just how I felt all the time. And I think the work was reflective of processing those experiences and that time of my life. It’s hard to remove yourself from what you already know. So, I didn’t know what the audience’s experience was. Luckily, I NTERV I E W
there were reviews and I would get a little taste of experiences. It’s been cool, over time, to get impressions from people and learn from those. Now the more recent work of mine is more straightforward in some ways. I used to say the earlier comics were like poetry. And now I kind of see it more as film or play. And there is a big difference in what I’m expecting from the interpretations between those things. DIALOGUES
In Reflections, there’s this feeling of a solitary person closing themselves herself off. In After Nothing Comes, that came up in story after story. In the work since then, there’s more interaction, there’s this central use of dialogues. But a lot of times there’s repeating phrases of people waiting OVERLEAF RIGHT: From Grip Vol. 1, 2018. OVERLEAF LEFT: From
Grip Vol. 2, 2019.
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