editorial
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elcome to the latest Tripwire print magazine. We were very proud of our first print magazine in ten years which we brought out in January so we decided to pubish another one this autumn. The magazine features a cross-section of content and writers, covering comics, film and TV. We have gone for two covers this time again: a Dark Horse at 35 Hellboy image and a David Michael Beck Fantastic Four 60th anniversary piece. We also utilised crowdfunding again to make this a reality. This time around, we have another cross section of film, TV and comics content like interviews with poster legend Drew Struzan, an
Scott Braden’s Lost Tales: Batman 33AD by Alan Weiss A look at the epic DC Batman series that never was. page 4
exclusive chat with comic writer and artist Liam Sharp and more. The hope is to do a new print special at least once a year. If you have seen Tripwire in print before, welcome back. And if this is the first time that readers have seen our print version, then it’s good to have you on board. Thanks for supporting us and thanks for reading. Joel Meadows editor-in-chief Tripwire
Portraits With Character
Photos of pre-eminent comic and genre figures like Guillermo del Toro, Walter Simonson and Andy Serkis page 58
Happy 40th Birthday Indy
Universally Loved Monsters And Other Strange Beasts
Drew Struzan on 40 years of everyone’s favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones
Looking at the legacy of the Universal Monsters movies page 70
page 12
Classics Illustrated
We got behind the covers of The Folio Society’s beautiful editions to find out how they are put together page 20
Looking Sharp
Liam Sharp looks back at his career and talks about what’s next page 74
The Power List 2021
Artfully Done
This year’s 40 movers and shakers in thr worlds of comics and genre
Artist/illustrator Alistair Little on his work and working practices page 28
BRINGING YOU SOME OF THE BIGGEST TALENT IN THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY • Signings and commission / original art opportunities with some of the top artists and writers in comics: • Alan Quah
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• Ram V
• Björn Barends
• Lee Bermejo
• Stefano Caselli
• Carla Cohen
• Lucio Parrillo
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• Sun Khamunaki
• Giuseppe Camuncoli
• Mel Milton
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Kicking Off The Marvel Age
Celebrate 60 years of Fantastic Four with creators John Byrne, Walter Simonson and more page 36
page 80
Claws And Effect Taking a look back at 40 years of John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London page 90
Funding Your Creative Dreams
From The Archive
Looking at the phenomena of kickstarter in comics and its increased influence in the market today page 44
Happy 35th Birthday Dark Horse Comics
35 years of Portland’s maverick comic publisher page 48
Classic interviews with Drew Struzan, Joe Kubert and Kyle Baker page 96
Stripwire
Featuring Sherlock Holmes & The Empire Builders, Fred The Clown, Kent Menace and Technofreak page 116
Editor-in-chief: Joel Meadows Senior editor: Andrew Colman Consulting editor: Scott Braden Contributing writers: Scott Braden,John Charles, James DC, Tim Hayes, Roger Langridge Contributing artists: Andy Bennett, Juan Castro, Jeff Dillon, Roger Langridge, Tom Newell Design and layout: Joel Meadows Thanks to: Mark Chiarello for his advice and support, David Hyde, Liam Sharp, Kris Longo at Heavy Metal, Matt Parkinson at Dark Horse, Jimmy Palmiotti, The Folio Society, Oriana Leckert at Kickstarter, Roger Langridge, Jeff Vaughn at Gemstone, Biff at Ace Comics, Calum at Strange Adventures, Andy Bennett and anyone else we have forgotten Tripwire Winter Special 2021 Published by Tripwire Magazine Limited, Flat 5 Crescent Lodge, 15 Sunningfelds Crescent, Hendon London NW4 4RD, UK ©2021 Tripwire Magazine Limited. All Rights Reserved. Hellboy cover illustration by Mike Mignola.Hellboy ™ & ©2021 Mike Mignola. Fantastic Four cover illustration by David Michael Beck. Fantastic Four ™ & ©2021 Marvel Comics. All Rights Reserved. No part or parts of this magazine may be reproduced on any media without the prior permission of the Publishers and infringements may result in prosecution. All characters and affilliated material©2021 their respective creators and copyright holders. Printed in the UK ISSN 1759-2585
father brought him up in? The same could be posed for anyone who must utilize violence while facing life and death situations almost constantly.
Scott Braden’s Lost Tales
Batman 33 AD
Scott Braden chats to writer/ artist Alan Weiss about DC’s Batman 33AD, an epic Batman Elseworlds story that never was from DC in the latest of his popular Lost Tales feature series…
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ccording to Wikipedia, inker-extraordinaire Joe Rubinstein called comic book grandmaster Alan Weiss “one of his favorite artists to ink,” because Weiss’ work was so intricate that he couldn’t tell what the final art would look like until he had finished inking it. Weiss has worked with everyone from Steve Gerber to Alan Moore to Jim Shooter. He created fan-favourite characters Steelgrip Starkey and War Dancer, among others; was one of the artists who brought rock phenomenon KISS to the four-color page; and provided a more realistic look to DC Comics’ Captain Marvel in the publisher’s Shazam! series in 1978 at the behest of writer E. Nelson Bridwell. He also worked up a “Lost Tale” regarding a never-finished
“As it was my concept, I intended to write the story as well, but not to do the art on this one. I had just finished another Batman “Elseworlds” graphic novel, a western version taking place during the Civil War, called The Blue, The Grey, and the Bat.”t
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“Batman’s a good character. We all grew up with him. Who doesn’t love the Batman? If anything about him inspires me it’s the quality of so much of the artwork associated with the guy. Also, at the time, he was DC’s best seller. That fact afforded some inspiration as well..”t Warlock story for Marvel Comics, which if completed would have been reminiscent of the Jonathan Swift novel Gulliver’s Travels. While we are on the subject of “Lost Tales,” Weiss – one of comicdom’s true rare geniuses – was going to have the Distinguished Competition’s Dark Knight defending Christianity’s Son of God within the pages of the lost “Elseworlds” graphic novel, Batman 33 A.D. Here is how it was going to go down. TRIPWIRE: What is it about the character of DC Comics’ Batman that inspires you as a comic book creator? What do you propose is responsible for the dark hero’s amazing 80 year-plus run in comics? ALAN WEISS: Well, Batman’s a good character. We all grew up with him. Who doesn’t love the Batman? If anything about him inspires me it’s the
quality of so much of the artwork associated with the guy. Also, at the time, he was DC’s best seller. That fact afforded some inspiration as well. TW: How did you come up with your idea for the Dark Knight meeting Jesus Christ in Ancient Rome? What year did you come up with this extraordinary story idea? AW: I believe it was 1992 that I had the idea, just after I’d finished drawing another Batman graphic novel. I was considering the fundamental motivation of the character, and how elements of achieving the goals of that motivation might conflict with some of his most basic beliefs. That is, Bruce Wayne must be a Christian, most likely a well-to-do W.A.S.P. So, the simple question becomes, how does he reconcile the violence required by his Dark Knight night job in light of the dictates of the religion his mother and
TW: What was your basic story? Was this to be a standalone graphic novel or a limited series? AW: Given the above premise, I decided to take that question, and the main character, all the way back to the beginning of Christianity. And so the Roman-born aristocrat Brucius becomes the Vespirtilio, The Bat, the Masked Gladiator, protector of Jerusalem, in Palestine. As this graphic novel was to be an “Elseworlds” project, setting the story in 33 AD was not an obstacle. With that, what I thought a very intriguing and hopefully commercially successful title: Batman 33 AD (or, as I referred to it – Batman meets Jesus) was born. Were you going to write and draw the series – or was someone else supposed to be brought in as the project’s artist? As it was my concept, I intended to write the story as well, but not to do the art on this one. I had just finished another Batman “Elseworlds” graphic novel, a western version taking place during the Civil War, called The Blue, The Grey, and the Bat. In it, Batman was done as homage to one of his two original inspirational forbears, Zorro. That story was also my idea, and I drew the story, with Jose Luis Garcia inking and Elliot S! Maggin scripting. But for Batman 33, I had Michael Nasser (now Netzer) in mind as the artist. He was a friend, and coincidentally was going through a spiritual/religious “reconstruction” at the time, and was very passionate about Christianity at its core. So, in one way, his spiritual struggle inspired the original concept. As I couldn’t draw the story due to other commitments, Michael was therefore the perfect choice. He was, and is, a terrific artist. TW: Did you have an editor for the project – or had you submitted the idea to anyone at DC Comics at the time? AW: Yes, I submitted the idea and a story synopsis to Dick Giordano at DC. After expressing concerns and cautioning me as to what could and couldn’t be done storywise concerning Jesus, he ran it past the brass, and to my surprise, they gave it the green light! Denny O’Neil was set to be the editor. I felt the ending of the story would step on no spiritual toes and would serve the TRIPWIRE 5
No, I can assure you nothing historical was adjusted or changed. But then, the Bible, the New Testament, isn’t historical. TW copyright©2021 Scott Braden. character and original concept very well. In addition, I felt the book would have to be a big seller, even if only based upon curiosity and potential controversy. But actually, in the story itself, there is no real controversy. TW: Have you thought of using the idea in another comic late on, or would you like to revisit this idea with the Caped Crusader someday? AW: Sure, I’ve considered doing the original “Elseworlds” story elsewhere. Of course creating a new parallel character would never have the impact of doing the story with the super well-established Batman. If DC Comics were ever to get the gumption some sunny day to do this story . . . fine. I’m ready. But let us not hold our breath. TW: How was the story going to end? AW: About the time the project was coming together, I was relating the idea to some folks. As I was heading in to the climactic scene, I said, “So the story comes down to whether Batman can save J C from crucifixion. How do you think it ends?” One guy immediately spoke up, “Don’t tell me! I wanna read the book!” I felt that was the perfect response. Which book did he mean? Batman 33? Or that other one, I forget what it’s called -- but I think it has Testament somewhere in the title. 6 TRIPWIRE
Creating His Own Kind Of Monsters S
Tripwire’s consulting writer Scott Braden takes a look back at the output of seminal manga creator Go Nagai exy Amazon women likened to R. Crumb. Modern horrors likened to Berni Wrightson. Towering colossi likened to the great Jack Kirby. Manga and anime genius Go Nagai offers all these and more. He was born Kiyoshi Nagai on September 6, 1945, and he revolutionised the world of manga Making his professional debut in 1967 with Meakashi Polikichi, Nagai is best known for creating popular 1970s manga and anime series such as Cutie Honey, Devilman and Mazinger Z. Wikipedia states that he is credited with creating the super robot genre and for designing the first mecha robots piloted by a user from within a cockpit with Mazinger Z, and for pioneering the magical girl genre with Cutie Honey. The online
encyclopedia also says that Nagai fathered the post-apocalyptic manga/ anime genre with Violence Jack, and the “ecchi” genre with Harenchi Gakuen. In 2005, he became a professor at the Osaka University of Arts. He has been a member of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize’s nominating committee since 2009.
Modern Horrors When the energy and excitement behind Toho’s Godzilla was at its highest pinnacle in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Nagai was looking to make his own kind of monster. At the same time, not ignoring the growing popularity of American heroes like DC Comics’ Batman and Superman, as well as Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and Captain America, the storyteller also set out to
‘When the energy and excitement behind Toho’s Godzilla was at its highest pinnacle in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Nagai was looking to make his own kind of monster… The result was a hybrid of tragedy, terror, and ultra-violence: Nagai’s Devilman.’
pic: Georges Seguin
“I submitted the idea and a story synopsis to Dick Giordano at DC. After expressing concerns and cautioning me as to what could and couldn’t be done storywise concerning Jesus, he ran it past the brass, and to my surprise, they gave it the green light!”
create a different, very grim and gritty champion for audiences the world over. The result was a hybrid of tragedy, terror, and ultra-violence: Nagai’s Devilman. Devilman is a manga written and illustrated by Nagai focusing on a high school student named Akira Fudo who absorbs the powers of the demon “Amon” with help of his friend Ryo Asuka. He does this in order to battle the hideous creatures hidden in human society, thus calling himself “Devilman” in the process. The series was originally ordered by Toei Animation as a toneddown anime version of Nagai’s previous manga series, Demon Lord Dante. However, Nagai ended up writing a darker-toned manga that got more violent with each of Akira’s various challenges.” Devilman’s 39-episode anime series was developed by Toei Animation in 1972, while Nagai began Devilman as a manga in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine, barely a month before the anime series started. The manga was published between 11 June 1972 and 24 June 1973, while multiple editorials have released it in collected volumes (tankibon). Seven Seas Entertainment published the English translation of the original manga in two volumes in 2018. The series has since spawned numerous OVAs, manga, novels, films, and a sequel. Devilman and other characters from the series have shown up in cameo appearances numerous times in Go TRIPWIRE 7
‘Mazinger Z has spawned several sequels and spinoff series, among them being Great Mazinger, UFO Robot Grendizer and most recently, Mazinkaiser.’
‘Seven Seas Entertainment published the English translation of the original manga in two volumes in 2018. The series has since spawned numerous OVAs, manga, novels, films, and a sequel. Devilman and other characters from the series have shown up in cameo appearances numerous times in Go Nagai’s other works.’ Nagai’s other works. The most notable is Tomoharu Katsumata’s 1973 feature film Mazinger Z vs. Devilman, which features Devilman teaming up with Nagai’s titular robot to fight Dr. Hell. Then, in the 1990s, he was the dark inspiration behind the fiercely sexy anime and manga sensation, Lady Devilman. In 2018, a remake titled Devilman Crybaby directed by Masaaki Yuasa was created showing an alternate more modern-like retelling of the manga. “The manga has sold 50 million copies worldwide. Despite mixed reception in regards to whether or not the art
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was appealing, critics enjoyed Nagai’s darker take on the superhero tropes mostly due to how violent the manga was and recommended the manga to most readers who are not sensitive to gore. The series’ themes and Akira’s design have influenced multiple other series such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and X.” Super Robots Although his other Japanese-born, superrobotic brothers made more of an impact with younger American audiences in the late 1970s thanks to Mattel’s Shogun
Warriors line, the first official piloted super robot was Mazinger Z. Known briefly as Tranzor Z in the United States, Mazinger Z is a Japanese super robot manga series written and illustrated by Nagai. The first manga version was serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump from October 1972 to August 1973, and it later continued in Kodansha TV Magazine from October 1973 to September 1974. It was adapted into an anime television series which aired on Fuji TV from December 1972 to September 1974. A second manga series was released alongside the TV show, this one drawn by the great Gosaku Ota, which started and ended almost at the same time as the TV show. According to Wikipedia, “Mazinger Z is an enormous super robot, constructed with a fictional metal called Super-Alloy Z, which is forged from a new element (Japanium) mined from a reservoir found only in the sediment of Mt. Fuji, in Japan. The mecha was built by Professor Juzo Kabuto as a secret weapon against the forces of evil, represented in the series by the Mechanical Beasts of Dr. Hell. The latter was the German member of a Japanese archeological team, which discovered ruins of a lost pre-Grecian civilization on an island named Bardos, the Mycéne Empire. One of their findings was that the Mycene used an army of steel titans about 20 meters in height. Finding prototypes of those titans underground which could be remotecontrolled and realising their immense power on the battlefield, Dr. Hell goes insane and has all the other scientists of his research team killed except for
Professor Kabuto, who manages to escape. The lone survivor goes back to Japan and attempts to warn the world of its imminent danger. Meanwhile, Dr. Hell establishes his headquarters on a mobile island, forms the new Underground Empire, and plans to use the Mechanical Monsters to become the new ruler of the world. To counter this, Kabuto constructs Mazinger Z and manages to finish it just before being killed by a bomb planted by Hell’s right-hand person, Baron Ashura, a half-man, half-woman. As he lies dying, he manages to inform his grandson Koji Kabuto about the robot and its use. Koji becomes the robot’s pilot, and from that point on battles both the continuous mechanical monsters, and the sinister henchmen sent by Doctor Hell.” Mazinger Z has spawned several sequels and spinoff series, among them being Great Mazinger, UFO Robot Grendizer, and most recently, Mazinkaiser. Other iterations were the Hyborean-based God Mazinger, futuristic Mazin Saga, and highintensity Z Mazinger. All were popular on both sides of the Pacific, and all were mighty!
a visit – a company man that helped shepherd his Devilman and Mazinger Z properties from manga hits into anime classics. The planning director wanted something that was different, erotic, and fantastic – and he wanted it from Nagai right then and there. “What about a heroine who can transform,” the Toei representative suggested. And with that, Nagai made magic. Cutie Honey is a Japanese shonen manga series that first appeared in Weekly Shonen Champion’s 41st issue of 1973. The series ran until April 1974. It follows an android girl named Honey Kisaragi, who transforms into the busty, red or pink-haired heroine Cutie Honey to fight against the assorted
villains that threaten her or her world. One of the trademarks of the character is that the transformation involves the temporary loss of all her clothing in the brief interim from changing from one form to the other. According to Nagai, she is the first female to be the protagonist of a shonen manga series And, according to a Bandai survey, Cutie Honey ranked first in the ‘Favourite Characters’ surveyed in April 1997 in two categories: girls aged 3 to 5 and girls aged 6 to 8. These three stories solidified Nagai’s legacy as a storyteller. His full body of work made him a living legend. But that is a discussion for another time. Stay tuned. TW
Magical Girlz In Nagai’s afterword for Seven Seas Entertainment’s top-selling Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection, the character’s creator takes readers back to the spring of 1973 when the popularity of his brilliant Mazinger Z showed no signs of stopping. In it, Nagai remembers when a planning director of Toei Animation paid him TRIPWIRE 9
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Happy 40th Birthday
“Great concept; great writing; great actors; and great directors. The film industry never rides on one talent or one idea. The mixing of many talents makes this industry work. I don’t think you can underestimate the influence of Harrison Ford and the mix of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. We live through Indy’s adventures. ” TRIPWIRE: What do you think explains the longevity of Indiana Jones? DREW STRUZAN: Great concept; great writing; great actors; and great directors. The film industry never rides on one talent or one idea. The mixing of many talents makes this industry work. I don’t think you can underestimate the influence of Harrison Ford and the mix of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. We live through Indy’s adventures. That’s the magic of movies and the gift of talent. Indy has become an old friend with whom we enjoy spending time.
2021 is the 40th anniversary of Indiana Jones and The Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Movie poster artist Drew Struzan has created iconic images for all four Indy films so far and he just spoke to Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows about the longevity of Indiana Jones and working on the four movie posters… 12 TRIPWIRE
TW: When you were approached to create the first film poster, what was your brief for it? DS: Raiders of the Lost Ark was
the beginning of Indiana Jones. No one knew what to expect and so the marketing was handled very hush hush. I received a few paragraphs describing the story and some photos of the characters. That was it.I knew Harrison Ford was the lead and that there was a love interest, there were Nazi’s and the search was for the lost Ark of the Covenant. I was a Bible reader so knew what the Ark was all about. I did a lot of guesswork about what the film might look like in the first set of comprehensive pieces. Once my comps were seen by George Lucas, I was given his feedback and based on that I created the poster which was mainly used for the international market. One thing I appreciated about George’s feedback was that Karen Allen’s role was not a secondary or
subservient one. She was Indy’s equal and should be represented as such in the poster. TW: Did Harrison Ford sit for the Raiders of The Lost Ark poster? DS: Actors never sit for poster work. In most instances, they have moved on to other projects. They may not even look the same. In more recent times, photography has been employed for marketing purposes during or shortly after the film’s shooting. Most of my career, I relied on the photography that was taken by the set photographer. Most often I posed models as body doubles for the characters that would appear in the poster. As the Indiana Jones films rolled out, I built a nice collection of paraphernalia: a couple of whips from the guy that did them TRIPWIRE 13
“I have always enjoyed working with Steven Spielberg. Likewise Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. With The Last Crusade came another opportunity to draw Sean Connery.” for the film, a replica Webley (which came in later in the series) and holster, khakis and shirts, a bag to throw over my shoulder, an authentic Indy jacket made by the guys that outfitted Harrison, and a hat … a really nice hat.
top as a place for the title.
TW: How much of the soundtrack had you heard before you created that soundtrack cover? DS: I didn’t hear any of the soundtrack before creating the TW: Did you get to do any set visits artwork. That’s not how Hollywood for the film too? works for illustrators. What inspires DS: Never for Indy. Most of the locations me for the work I do is seeing what were nowhere near where I live. I’m not the director has laid out in the film. part of the production crew. I am hired I see the photos and, ideally, speak by the studios as part of marketing. with the director. With the early The work comes to me after the film is Indiana Jones work, the information finished shooting, in most cases. And I was always busy working on other projects while they were busy filming. TW: When you were commissioned to create the cover art for the soundtrack/ LP for Raiders Of The Lost Ark, how much background did you have when you were putting that together or did you create it blind? DS: The art I created for the poster for Raiders of the Lost Ark was the same art that was used for the soundtrack. It was just cropped differently. I believe the request to use the art for the soundtrack came after I had created the poster art. I remember extending the pillars out to the side and adding more stonework at the top to create the square shape needed for the soundtrack cover. They used the additional stonework at the 14 TRIPWIRE
came through an art director. It wasn’t until later in my career that I was able to sit down with directors and hear from the horse’s mouth what he or she intended for the story/movie. TW: Was it easier to create the Temple of Doom poster? DS: Each poster is its own vision that stems from the intent of the film. One is not easier than another as far as creation goes. With Temple of Doom, I was privy to much more information about the film. In that regard, it was easier to come up with the image. More information is always better for creation.
DS: I do not remember that. That was 1984! “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.” What I can remember is the normal way I approached almost every project. There’s a call from the art director at whatever studio is distributing the film. We meet. He or she gives me the basic outline of the story. Then I look through binders and binders full of the set photographer’s work. From that I gather the visual tone of the film. I combine that with the verbal explanation of the art director and pretty much have my ideas for the comprehensives. I go home and do that work and meet back with the art director. If the director is available, then I meet with the director and we discuss his vision. The director is usually interested in what I’m thinking, too. Somewhere in there, the forward momentum of the campaign gels. TW: Did you know that the UK poster for Temple of Doom didn’t feature any of your art on it? DS: I did not know that but it isn’t surprising. Each country has to do what they think is best for their audience. TW: And do you know why they
didn’t use your art for the UK poster? DS: I have no idea about their decisions. TW: You also created The Last Crusade poster in 1989. What was it like returning to depict the character for the third time? DS: I have always enjoyed working with Steven Spielberg. Likewise Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. With Last Crusade came another opportunity to draw Sean Connery. I had drawn him for The Name of the Rose. Plus, Pepsi came in on this project and I did a lot of “point of purchase” art for them as did my son which was a fun opportunity. So the film was about a father and son relationship and so was the creation of the artwork. I very much enjoyed working with my son, much like Indy did in the film. There is a lot of love in that kind of relationship. TW: And what was your brief for this poster too? DS: See answer to the early question about briefs.. Same answer here except that I was also working with the people at Pepsi to create images
that allowed their product to shine. TW: There was a nineteen year gap between The Last Crusade and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. What was it like returning to Indy after such a long break? DS: I paint. That’s what I do pretty much nonstop. For me, there was not a big gap between the films but one does get excited to hear that another Indiana Jones film is being made and the hope rises that I would be called on to create another poster. As I said, Indiana Jones is a beloved franchise and I’m always excited to hear that Harrison has signed on for the job of giving us another wild ride. TW: With a fifth film coming out in the next couple of years, is there any possibility you could be coaxed out of retirement to create one last Indiana Jones poster? DS: We’ll see. I cannot predict the future. TW
Read our classic career interview with Drew Struzan in our archive section here later in this issue too
“For me, there was not a big gap between the films but one does get excited to hear that another Indiana Jones film is being made and the hope rises that I would be called on to create another poster. As I said, Indiana Jones is a beloved franchise and I’m always excited to hear that Harrison has signed on for the job of giving us another wild ride”
TW: How did you approach that? DS: Seeing that Indy was going to be part of our lives, I wanted to create a signature look for the film. You will notice the border of the painting is jagged which creates a tension and curiosity for what our main character will experience. The fire, the elephants, Kate Capshaw, even the title brake the borders giving Indy, the biggest portrait of all, the essence of being bigger than life. His adventures are going to be bigger than life. And we are going to have fun. The bad guys are red surrounded by fire and conflict. The good guys are the calming, happy element. TW: And what was your brief for this poster? TRIPWIRE 15
IT’S NOT THE YEARS
IT’S THE MILEAGE
2021 marks 40 years since Indiana Jones first burst onto our cinema screens in Raiders of The Lost Ark. Regarded as one of the all-time great American movies, has it aged gracefully asks Tripwire contributing writer Ed Hipkiss?
‘Watching the film again some 40 years on, it’s remarkable how little the film has dated. This is partly down to the extensive use of practical effects.’
T
he brainchild of George Lucas (as Indiana Smith) in the early 1970s, Lucas instead focused on developing his idea for a space opera – the little remembered Star Wars (1977). However, after discussing the idea with Steven Spielberg that same year, the project began to move forward with Spielberg attached as
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director. Although that seems like a sound decision now with Spielberg’s track record of well-remembered and reviewed blockbuster movies, at the time he was coming off the back of the film 1941 (1979) which had not only been over-schedule and over-budget, but also a massive flop. Fortunately, Lucas refused to do the film without Spielberg’s involvement. Paramount
Pictures agreed to produce the film in exchange for exclusive rights to any sequels and severe penalties for exceeding the schedule or budget. Paramount also insisted on an 85-day filming schedule. Lucas, Spielberg and Producer Frank Marshall agreed on a 73-day schedule amongst themselves in order to avoid any criticism of another project overrun. Which they achieved. As Spielberg hated the surname “Smith”, the three of them agreed on “Jones” instead and set about casting the lead for their film. Several actors were considered, including Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Jack Nicholson, and Casting Director Mike Fenton’s preferred choice of Jeff Bridges. Ultimately the part was offered to Tom Selleck. Unfortunately, Selleck was under contract to appear in Magnum PI if it went to a series (at the time he was filming a pilot), and by making enquiries as to his availability to film Raiders with CBS, Lucas and Spielberg inadvertently panicked them into
greenlighting Magnum PI to a full series leaving them with no lead actor mere weeks before filming began. Thankfully, an actors strike delayed filming by 3 months giving them time to recast the part. Despite Lucas feeling that Harrison Ford would be ideal for the role, he also thought that he would not be interested in committing to another trilogy (as Indiana Jones was projected to be from the start). But after sounding him out, Ford proved very keen as it sounded like a fun project and agreed to take the part, albeit with the option to rewrite his dialogue if chose to. The plot of Raiders concerns a Nazi scheme (actual swastikawearing Nazis, not the imaginary ones that have magically started to
lurk on every street corner if social media is to be believed) to locate and unearth the Ark of The Covenant. Jones is recruited by American Army Intelligence to recover the Ark first. What follows over the course of the film’s 115 minutes is an exciting globe trotting adventure filled with stunts, plot twists, terrific set pieces, and a host of memorable characters. Indy himself is toned down from the playboy, ninja warrior originally envisioned by Lucas, to a more rounded professor of Archaeology. In Marion Ravenwood (played by Karen Allen), we have a love interest for Jones who is both spirited and tough as well as a match for him. Museum Curator Marcus Brody, played by the late, great, Denholm Elliott acts
as Jones’ confidante, however briefly. Also criminally underused is Ronald Lacey who has a memorable turn as the sadistic Gestapo agent Major Arnold Toht; first having the image of a medallion burnt into his hand in a botched attempt to recover it for the Reich, then having his face melted off at the end of the film. Rounding out the main cast are Paul Freeman as Rene Belloq, a rival archaeologist in league with the Nazis, and John Rhys-Davies as Sallah the Egyptian excavator and old friend of Indy’s. The film is also notable for the first theatrical appearance of Alfred Molina as Jones’ guide Satipo in the film’s opening sequence. Watching the film again some 40 years on, it’s remarkable how little the film has dated. This is partly down to the extensive use of practical effects. Where it does show its age slightly, and it’s hardly unique in this given the many advances in the last 40 years, is in some of the special effects – particularly when the Covenant is opened at the end of the film. The film’s opening sequence is still thrilling, especially Indy’s escape from the giant boulder in one of the film’s best remembered scenes. And Indy’s “pistol versus whip” moment which remains both funny and a highlight of TRIPWIRE 17
3-4 September 2022
www.tripwirecomiccons.com
the film. The spiders and snakes used in the film remain suitably creepy, even if we can clearly see on repeat viewings that the snakes are often complimented by static replicas! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s an elaborate car chase, a fight in front of (and under) a plane trying to take off, and an escape in a German U-Boat. On its release in 1981, little was expected of Raiders. The film industry had been in decline with few box office hits. Audience polling suggested little
awareness or interest for the film, and there were other, bigger films due for release at the same time, such as Superman II and the latest James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only. On its release in the United States and Canada, it debuted in the number one spot and went on to become the highest grossing film of 1981 netting $354 million worldwide. Regularly featuring on lists of greatest films ever made, it has gone on to spawn 3 sequels: Indiana Jones And
Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989) complete the original planned trilogy. A fourth film, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, appeared in 2008, with a fifth now scheduled for release in 2023. There has also been a short-lived television spin off, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1993), as well as comics (published by Marvel comics in the 1980s and then Dark Horse in the early 1990s), novels and video games. TW
‘On its release in 1981, little was expected of Raiders. The film industry had been in decline with few box office hits. Audience polling suggested little awareness or interest for the film’
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Tripwire Presents Bristol Comic Con is a new comic convention taking place at the Doubletree at Hilton in Redcliffe in Bristol. It will be a show that will feature top UK, US and European guests including legend Howard Chaykin (American Flagg!, Hey Kids, Comics) , Brian Stelfreeze (Black Panther), Jorge Fornes (Rorschach), Elena Casagrande (Black Widow, Blade Runner), Sean Phillips (Criminal, Reckless), Jock (Batman, movie poster artist), Martin Simmonds (Department Of Truth), Mike Perkins (The Swamp Thing) and many others to be announced. It will also include workshops with the best in international talent over the weekend. 2022 is Tripwire’s 30th anniversary and we shall be launching our special Tripwire book at the show plus we shall be including exhibitions of Tripwire editor-in-chief Joel Meadows’ comics and genre portrait photos and select artwork from many of the guests attending the show. TRIPWIRE 19
Classics Illustrated
Guide to the images on the left hand side
Tom Walker, Publisher, Sheri Gee, Art Director and Raquel Leis Allion, Art Director just spoke to Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows about the genesis and execution of a Folio Society illustrated edition
Title: The Foundation Trilogy Author: Isaac Asimov Illustrator: Alexander Wells
Title: Dune Author: Frank Herbert Illustrator: Sam Weber
Title: His Dark Materials Author: Philip Pullman Illustrator: Peter Bailey
Title: A Storm of Swords Author: George R. R. Martin Illustrator: Jonathan Burton
Title: The Left Hand of Darkness Author: Ursula K. Le Guin Illustrator: David Lupton
Title: Ubik Author: Philip K. Dick Illustrator: La Boca
Title: Something Wicked This Way Comes Author: Ray Bradbury Illustrator: Tim McDonagh
Title: Kafka on the Shore Author: Haruki Murakami Daniel Liévano
Title: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & A Scanner Darkly Author: Philip K. Dick Illustrator: Andrew Archer and Chris Skinner
Title: Anansi Boys Author: Neil Gaiman Illustrator: Francis Vallejo
Title: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Author: Douglas Adams Illustrator: Jonathan Burton
Title: The Book of the New Sun Author: Gene Wolfe Illustrator: Sam Weber
Title: The Handmaid’s Tale Author: Margaret Atwood Illustrators: Anna and Elena Balbusso
Title: Howl’s Moving Castle Author: Diana Wynne Jones Illustrator: Marie-Alice Harel
Title: Captain America Selected and introduced by: Roy Thomas Illustrator: Michael Cho - cover art
Title: Noughts and Crosses Author: Malorie Blackman Illustrator: Kingsley Nebechi
Title: Planet of the Apes Author: Pierre Boulle Illustrator: David de las Heras
Title: Around the World in Eighty Days Author: Jules Verne Illustrator: Kristjana S. Williams Title: I Am Legend Author: Richard Matheson Illustrator: Dave McKean Title: Jurassic Park Author: Michael Crichton Illustrator: Vector That Fox
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“It most often begins with a conversation, whether that’s with one of our readers, our authors, our illustrators or just amongst the Folio team. Someone will spark an idea: an illustrator might mention their favourite book. “
TRIPWIRE: How does the planning for a Folio Society book begin? TOM WALKER It most often begins with a conversation, whether that’s with one of our readers, our authors, our illustrators or just amongst the Folio team. Someone will spark an idea: an illustrator might mention their favourite book or one of our readers might unearth a little-known gem. Those sparks then get fanned by me or one of our editors into the flame of an idea: we’ll look at where the book could best sit in the Folio list, we’ll discuss a design and art approach, we’ll research any textual issues or possible introducers. Once we have had those early conversations, we’re usually so excited by the project that it’s easy to persuade others at Folio that this is the perfect next book for us. TW: How long is the planning stage and the gap between when a book gets started to its completion? TOM WALKER: There is no formula. In a way that’s the most distinctive thing about Folio’s publishing: that we treat each book on its own merits, so the design and thinking around it may
–Tom Walker
Raquel Leis Allion
differ wildly from book to book. With a following wind it can take as little as a year from idea to publication, but, on the whole, it’s usually more like two years – and often more, particularly with the limited editions programme where we may be waiting five years or more for the perfect artist. TW: How does an illustrator get chosen? RLA: Choosing illustrators takes time, but we are lucky enough to have so many varied places and spaces to source illustrators and artists these days. Social media platforms have increased our options. We still go through the traditional routes of approaching illustration agencies. We go directly to the illustrator if they are not with an agent and we also get illustrators/artists approaching us. TW: Do you as art directors draw up a shortlist and then whittle it down to the successful candidate?
Sheri Gee 22 TRIPWIRE
SG: As we read the book, we usually get ideas on the right visual style that will work with the narrative – that will sometimes be as precise as one person whose work we already know and think is spot on for the book, but sometimes we’ll look
around for illustrators with that particular style. This often results in us having a short list to discuss with the editor and in-house team, though sometimes there is still just that one perfect ideal illustrator that we’d really like to commission. If a book is in copyright, which requires author, estate or rights approval before we can commission, it is sometimes preferable for us to have a few different directions to present to them. TW: How often does The Folio Society use an illustrator that has already been used on previous projects? RLA We have worked with some artists for many years on many projects. We will work with an illustrator/artist who we have previously worked with if they suit a specific book genre or if we need to continue with a series that has already began. It’s always Tom Walker
“If the book is in copyright, we can’t commission until we have author, their estate or the rights holder’s approval of our illustration direction. Once that’s been agreed and we commission, we ask the illustrator to read the book and select scenes that inspire them.“–Sheri Gee great to work with illustrators/ artists we know as we have built a good relationship. However, we are always looking and working with new artists. TW: Once an illustrator is picked, can you please talk us through the process of commissioning and completing a project? SG: As mentioned, if the book is in copyright, we can’t commission until we have author, their estate or the rights holder’s approval of our illustration direction. Once that’s been agreed and we commission, we ask the illustrator to read the book and select scenes that inspire them – scenes that are ideally well-spaced throughout the text, that deal with major characters and events and ask them not to illustrate the final few pages, for technical reasons. We like to get the illustrator’s enthusiasm and inspiration rather than dictating scenes that we think would work. Some illustrators will give us an extensive list before roughs, which
we can then help them to narrow down to the 6-12 illustrations commissioned; some will give us a precise list with accompanying roughs straight away. Once we have roughs of the illustrations, we’ll work with the editor to check them against the text, making sure that character and scene descriptions are correct, and that period details
have been observed. This can take extensive research, depending on the details given in the text – some authors are more precise in their descriptions than others. At this point, we may ask the illustrator for revisions, making sure that what we approve at rough is correct on all levels. Once they’re all approved, we give the illustrator the go
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“When we started with A Game of Thrones, we knew we really had to make something special and thought hard about where we could add detail and excitement – from two-colour narrator motifs and sigils, the fold-out map and printed slipcase interior.“
“If I had to choose a current one it would be the Limited Edition of The Complete Short Stories by Philip K. Dick. Simply because it was a project that had never been done before. “–Raquel Leis Allion
–Sheri Gee
ahead for finals. Since they’ve already been checked at rough, ideally the approval process with final illustrations is very straight forward, but sometimes a few things crop up that need adjustment. Aside from the illustrations, we ask the illustrator for cover artwork. That can be sometimes an unusual process for the illustrator, partly, for example, due to the technical aspects of designing for blocking, but partly as the brief is slightly different to that of the internal illustrations: coming up with a single image that has shelf and web appeal, that sums up the book sufficiently (but doesn’t contain a spoiler) or creates enough intrigue to make someone want to know more. From initial pencil roughs we’ll suggest technical applications for the final design – whether the design would work better printed or blocked, on cloth or a different substrate. We will show the rough for approval to the in-house team, consisting of editorial, production and marketing and then it will go for external approval if necessary before we can move onto final artwork. Usually we take in the cover illustration and design the type and choose the materials ourselves. It’s a lovely part of the job choosing all the aspects which will make the books special – the cloth colours, coloured tops, endpapers, ribbon markers, slipcase colours and designs. Once the cover is finalised, we get a dummy book made up, 24 TRIPWIRE
both as product development and for marketing photography. It’s important at this point to make sure it looks great and that everything went to plan, before we order the final books. TW: How closely do you work with each illustrator and how detailed is each brief for each project? RLA The brief we give the artist isn’t detailed in sense that we tell them exactly what to do. Within the brief we give details such as the dimensions for the binding and page size for inside illustrations. We also state whether we want full colour or black and white, how many images are requires and how they may want to approach the binding. Apart from that we trust the illustrator/ artist. We want them to work on our projects pretty much as they would if they were working on their own personal projects. If we were to prescribe exactly what we think was best for each book, we would never get the best out of the artist; we commission them because we think their work is suitable for the project. We work closely with the artist in terms of seeing that the scenes they have chosen are evenly spread
throughout the book, or if they need any technical advice. We also check alongside the editor that the images are accurate, if the text refers to someone with mousey brown hair but the artist has added blonde hair, we ask for that to be changed. It’s more a case of guiding the artist when needed and not shadowing them at every single stage. TW: Illustrators move at different speeds. Apart from increasing the commissioning and production period, how do you make certain that a project comes out as scheduled? SG: When we approach an illustrator for a title, the book is already pretty firm in our publishing schedule, with deadlines to meet the final delivery date. Therefore, we give a schedule to the illustrator at the outset and most have really good experience of their time keeping and ability to meet the dates, knowing whether they can accept the commission. If we’ve worked with someone before, we’ll have a good idea how good they are at meeting dates but obviously there are odd occasions where unseen circumstances crop up that hinder their productivity, some things
can’t be planned for. In an ideal world we like to give illustrators around 5-6 months to work on the commission, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer - it may depend when the book is confirmed in the programme. If there are delays with rights, meaning we couldn’t start as early as we’d have liked, it might add a little more pressure. We sometimes have a little leeway if things go a bit astray, depending on the project. TW: The Folio Society has an amazing body of work thanks to decades publishing these editions. If you each had to choose one edition to pick as the one that you are most proud of, would you be able to and what would it be? SG: This is an incredibly difficult question. With each book we work on it feels like we’re pushing ourselves to create something better than before. One project which comes to mind is the A Song of Ice and Fire series. When we started with A Game of Thrones, we knew we really had to make something special and thought hard about where we could add detail and excitement – from two-colour narrator motifs and sigils, two double page spreads and six single page illustrations per volume, the
fabulous fold-out map, printed endpapers, duotone cloth, a blocked slipcase and printed slipcase interior. It’s been great watching the series develop, seeing all the fabulous artwork from illustrator Jonathan Burton, following the design decisions that we made on the first book in the series. RLA: This is a tricky question. I think each edition we publish has its own merit. If I had to choose a current one it would be the Limited Edition of The Complete Short Stories by Philip K. Dick. Simply because it was a project that had never been done before at The Folio Society where both art directors worked simultaneously across the four volumes, between us we commissioned 24 artists to do a single image for the inside, plus worked with the designers for the box and bindings. TW: With all the changes in the publishing industry and an increased presence for digital publications, The Folio Society produces work that can only exist as physical objects. Do you both see that there will be a continued interest? TOM WALKER: There’s no doubt that interest in beautiful books has
grown massively in recent years. For me that is a direct result of our increasingly fast and disposable digital world as readers look to classic books, to craftsmanship, to thoughtful design as a counterbalance in their lives. Publishing as a wider industry has responded so well to that over the last decade – the standard of book design has never been higher – and Folio is at the forefront. TW: On a related question, how has the Folio Society adapted and evolved with the times? TOM WALKER: Folio has changed in more ways than I can relate here! There is strong continuity: creating beautifully made, lasting books has been at the heart of our enterprise for almost 75 years. The titles themselves are profoundly different though: although some books will always be considered ‘classic’, the term is a moveable feast, and Folio publishes a far more contemporary and relevant range of literature in all genres than we ever have done; and our design is more confident and, I think, exciting. TW: If you had to boil down what a Folio Society edition is in just one sentence, how would you describe it? TOM WALKER Folio is a unique and proudly independent publisher, making some of the most beautiful books in the world. OR A one-stop-shop for book fetishists. TW
https://www.foliosociety.com TRIPWIRE 25
The Folio Society covers begin at the concept stage like this pencil rough here (top) and these more developed concept drawings (bottom) for books like their limited edition version of George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire. The final version is on the righthand page here
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TRIPWIRE 27
Artfully Done
A
listair Little works in his garden studio in Surrey just outside London. He wasn’t always a painter, he revealed to me as we sat down in his lounge with a cup of tea to get started. “I left sixth form college where I studied A-Level Art. My first job was at Shepperton Studios as a runner on Stallone’s Judge Dredd. It was amazing to be part of a huge budget movie.” As someone who had grown up reading Judge Dredd’s adventures weekly, it was a dream project for him, even though it wasn’t a massive commercial hit. “As a nineteen-year-old working on something like this you just thought ‘Wow!’. I know the film wasn’t a great success but I grew up reading 2000AD so walking around the sets in a world I knew so well
was a real thrill”. As for finding model making within the industry, “I don’t know if it still works this way but you make tea for people and you do all the running jobs for various departments. I’d made models as a kid and painted miniatures for role playing games so model making felt like a natural home for me. A model maker named Robbie Scott was kind enough to take me under his wing and guide me through that first production”. He has fond memories of working with Scott. “He was a lovely guy and if I’d stuck at it, I would have gone on to work with him but circumstances meant that didn’t happen” Little worked in the industry for three years but felt directionless at times. “I drifted around a bit but wanted
“I don’t know if it still works this way but you make tea for people and you do all the running jobs for various departments.”
Alistair Little is an artist who has been working professionally for the past twenty three years. Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows caught up with Alistair at his home just before the lockdown hit way back in February last year to talk to him about his career and how it has evolved since he began as a teenager working in film. Photos: Joel Meadows 28 TRIPWIRE
TRIPWIRE 29
Raging, a print created by Little for New York prints company Bottleneck based on Martin Scorsese’s seminal Raging Bull film
“I latched on to this idea of ‘narrative art’ in the early 2000s and started approaching galleries. Two local galleries began showing my work.” more. What I wanted was what Robbie got out of his work and I became disenchanted with the lack of opportunities to learn more. I should say I was naïve and somewhat lacked initiative”
He recalls an epiphany he had about his work. “I went out for lunch with friends one day. I was feeling a bit down. A friend asked me if I could see myself doing this in twenty years. My
Portcullis by Little Little 30 TRIPWIRE
answer was ‘No’. So he said to me ‘You probably shouldn’t be doing this’. Then I thought ‘What the hell am I going to do? I can paint and draw, maybe I should give that a go.’” Thinking about what he could do next led him down a very different path. “A friend of mine had met a storyboard artist who worked in advertising. His name was Bill Bradshaw. He was kind enough to give me
work colouring his storyboards. He taught me an awful lot in terms of narrative storytelling, composition and form but most importantly how to really look. I did realise I’m not quick enough to do sequential art or storyboards. I was reasonably good at layouts and one sheets but ultimately advertising really wasn’t for me”. Little worked with Bradshaw for nearly ten years. It proved an invaluable experience and he made a lifelong friend in Bill. “I started to work for Bill in the late 90’s but after nearly ten years, colouring work reduced due to changes in the industry, notably due to work being made in Photoshop and Illustrator.”
Little’s work here led him on to the next stage of his career. “I’ve got a huge love of film and I started copying stills from films, completing them in markers and gouache. Using the narrative skills I’d learned from Bill I started to create my own compositions (I still tend to think of my paintings as film stills). Over time I started using acrylic paint and later moved on to using oils.” It didn’t take long for him to build up momentum with his work. “I latched on to this idea of ‘narrative art’ in the early 2000s and started approaching galleries. Two local galleries began showing my work, including the Century Gallery TRIPWIRE 31
“I’d rather work nine to five and not weekends. I’d rather spend that time with my family. Although being self-employed does tend to be allencompassing.” in Datchet, Berkshire. That really felt like the start of it to me. I sold my first paintings through them.” “I was constantly approaching galleries with my work. I worked out that I approached over 700 galleries around this time, but it was through a friend that I was introduced to the Panter & Hall Gallery in London in 2005. A relationship that continues to this day.” This gallery is one that he trusts, which is one of the reasons he is still signed with
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them all these years later. Little doesn’t just create illustrations based on movie images but powerful original imagery with serious emotional content. He likes to keep his work hours fairly regimented he informs me too. “I’d rather work nine to five and not weekends. I’d rather spend that time with my family. Although being selfemployed does tend to be all encompassing.” He also admits that these days he prefers the process of
making a painting to the finished painting. In terms of that process, Little does work in a particular way he explains to me. For him, the preparation for a painting is essential. “I get the idea in my head but it’s like a dream, so I try to get something down on paper. At this stage it’s more like note taking than sketching but it helps me visualise the initial idea.” “After those initial ideas I will take photo reference. Using the photo reference I then explore different compositions
“I work in oils. The artwork that excites me has got life and immediacy. This is where the comics I read growing up have had a lasting impact.” - sometimes in sketches, sometimes in Photoshop. When I’m happy with the final composition I move on to a painted thumbnail study or begin the final piece. It might sound counter-intuitive but the final painting is the stage I try to spend the least time on. If I’ve done my preparatory work properly the painting will paint itself. This also allows me to paint loosely. I’m constantly trying to communicate as much information as I can with as little brushwork as possible” He uses a particular medium to create his work and this is for a very specific reason. Even
TRIPWIRE 33
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A SONG OF
ICE AND FIRE Illustrated by Jonathan Burton
“I’m humbled by the fact that I can earn my living doing something that I love and that people want to hang my work on their walls.” though he doesn’t work in comics, comics have had a huge impact on him as an artist. “I work in oils. The artwork 34 TRIPWIRE
that excites me has got life and immediacy. This is where the comics I read growing up have had a lasting impact. They were full of narrative imagery that was full of action, high contrast and bright colours. Oils allow me to achieve these kinds of effects.” As we wrap up our chat he points out that it has taken him a long time, with many ups and downs, to get to this point but this time has been an essential part of his growth as an artist. “I’m humbled by the fact that I can earn my living doing something that I love and that people want to hang my work on their walls.” Alistair Little might have started on a different path professionally but it is obvious from chatting to him now that he knows exactly what he is doing. He is one of the best British illustrators currently working today with a distinctive dynamic feel to his pieces.
‘The Folio Society’s splendid new editions … are masterpieces of the bookmaker’s art’ George R. R. Martin
TW
Visit Alistair Little’s home on the web http://www.alistairlittle.com
Exclusively available from FOLIOSOCIETY.COM/ASOIAF
Kicking Off The Marvel Age Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman takes a look at the 60th annivesary of the characters who kicked off the Marvel Age: Fantastic Four. Plus we get four writers who have worked on classic runs of the series talk about their ongooing appeal
I
ncredibly, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s signature series is sixty this year. The de facto beginning of Marvel Comics as an ongoing concern and for many, the key point of progression in comics’ Silver Age, the Fantastic Four is recognised as the most important title of the last half-century. The concepts that were there at the beginning of the series had been tried and tested previously, whilst both men were already long-in-the-tooth veterans of the industry – what was new were the fleshed-out characters, as was the storytelling style that quickly became recognised as the Marvel Method. The title arrived at just the right time for the company, as the series would quickly supercede its progenitors, whilst also connecting with and acting as a conduit for a newly-created fanbase. Lee and Kirby had already contributed so much to the medium, and were to co-create other great titles for Marvel in the ensuing years (such as the Avengers, and Thor), but it is their long tenure on this series that cemented their place in pop culture, and as the definitive four-color partnership. The series itself would prove to be a hotbed of creativity, with many classic and genuinely original characters debuting within its pages that would all continue
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‘Eager to produce a series featuring a super-team similar to that at National, but also constrained by a draconian distribution arrangement that meant that Atlas could not be seen to be in direct competition with them, Goodman asked Lee and Kirby to come up with a group of characters that were off-the-wall and unconventional enough to slip under DC’s radar’ long after their creators had left the title. The origins of the series lie in the comics that both Lee and Kirby were involved in throughout the late ‘50s – the sensationalist yet toned-down alien monster stories published by Atlas in the wake of the comics code, and in Kirby’s case, a title that was very much a progenitor of the Fantastic Four – the DC series The Challengers Of The Unknown. Indeed in issue 3 of this title, one of the Challengers emerges from his spacecraft with powers similar to those of the Fantastic Four. At that time, rival company and industry leader DC (then known as National) had also started publishing super-hero books again, the most significant of which, the Justice League Of America, TRIPWIRE 37
would influence publisher Martin Goodman into producing a series of his own at the company that would soon be renamed Marvel Comics. Eager to produce a series featuring a super-team similar to that at National, but also constrained by a draconian distribution arrangement that meant that Atlas could not be seen to be in direct competition with them, Goodman asked Lee and Kirby to come up with a group of characters that were off-the-wall and unconventional enough to slip under DC’s radar, but who were clearly super-powered. As history (according to Lee) notes it, the veteran writer saw this as a last throw of the dice in an industry that he considered moribund and lacking in direction. The premise was simple enough – young scientist Reed Richards, together with his fiancée Sue Storm, her brother Johnny, and his best friend Ben Grimm, travel into space, enter a cosmic ray storm, crash land and emerge from the wreckage with super-powers befitting their personalities – the hot-headed Johnny Storm becomes the Human Torch, Reed Richards becomes Mr. Fantastic, with the power to stretch and reshape his body, Sue Storm turns into The Invisible Girl, and Ben Grimm, a truculent yet benevolent soul, transforms into the 38 TRIPWIRE
super-powered yet monstrous Thing, with the physiognomy of an orange brick wall. They immediately agree that such power must be for the common good and resolve to form a super-team. What was readily apparent with the first couple of issues was that Lee was onto something – believable characters, snappy dialogue and clever plotting that fleshed out the principle’s back stories juxtaposed well with their battles against pre-hero monsters and allowed a little irony to creep into the action and destruction. By issue three, the Fantastic Four gained their uniforms and within several more issues the title had divested itself of the previous era’s trappings. With an instant fan favourite on their hands, Lee and
‘Thomas’s run in particular in the late 1970s was excellent, imbued as it was with a knowing sense of fun that echoed the humour and feel of Lee’s classic period. With emerging artist George Perez on board, the series took itself none too seriously.’ Kirby were soon stepping up their game, introducing villains and supporting characters that were all inspired – issue 4 saw the revival of the anti-heroic Namor, the Sub-
Mariner (discovered by Johnny Storm, having been an amnesiac vagrant for many years!) and issue 5 the arch-nemesis of the group, Dr. Doom, followed in subsequent installments by the Puppet-Master, The Impossible Man, the Molecule Man and many others. Both creators had suddenly hit a phenomenal purple patch, with concepts and situations that were unparalleled in comics up to that point. Lee and Kirby’s tenure on the book started to approach its zenith from around issue 30 onwards. Over the next forty issues, the duo were continually coming up with fascinating characters and worlds that would all find a permanent place in the Marvel Universe – the warring alien races the Kree and the Skrulls, the Black Panther, The Inhumans, The Frightful Four, the childlike Him (Adam Warlock), and of course Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Debuting in issues 48 - 50, Lee and Kirby’s finest story arc in the title, the planet-devouring and omnipotent Galactus and his herald, the pious, implacable Silver Surfer were complex if not mystical creations that were perfect for the era and the title’s maturing readership. The partnership continued in this vein for another thirty issues, with regular appearances from the Silver Surfer, Dr. Doom and others providing a
‘Debuting in issues 48 - 50, Lee and Kirby’s finest story arc in the title, the planet-devouring and omnipotent Galactus and his herald, the pious, implacable Silver Surfer were complex if not mystical creations that were perfect for the era and the title’s maturing readership’ considerable draw for the reader. It was only towards the end of their 100 issue run that the quality started to falter. When Kirby left the series with issue 102, Lee’s interest started to taper off, the stories (with the exception of the classic Thing / Hulk battle in issue 112) gradually becoming inferior until he left with issue 125, replaced firstly by Archie Goodwin and then Gerry
Conway and Roy Thomas, the art chores ably handled mostly by Rick Buckler and John Buscema. Thomas’s run in particular in the late 1970s was excellent, imbued as it was with a knowing sense of fun that echoed the humour and feel of Lee’s classic period. With emerging artist George Perez on board, the series took itself none too seriously, notably in the arch, witty storyline featuring the Reed Richards of Counter-Earth, who together with members of the Frightful Four, hold the Fantastic Four for ransom in the Baxter Building, with the real Reed Richards banished to the Negative Zone. It was clear that Thomas was enjoying his time in charge of the Fantastic Four canon, whilst never tinkering with what made the series great. After 30 issues or so of changing creative teams, which led to a loss in direction for the series, John Byrne, who had already excelled enormously in the revival of the X-Men, took over as writer and artist with issue 232. Over the next 60 issues, Byrne revitalised the title and began a run that is considered second-best only to the original Lee and Kirby period. With virtually
complete creative control, Byrne managed to better Thomas’s efforts at bringing back the vintage feel of the title, whilst taking chances with the format of the book and, for the first time in the publisher’s history, altering the continuity of the Marvel Universe. Under his rein, the Thing was replaced by the She-Hulk, whilst his long-time girlfriend Alicia Masters ended up marrying the
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‘With Disney acquiring the entire inventory of 21st Century Fox in the latter part of the decade, the possibility of having an FF film as part of the MCU became a reality’ ‘Over the next 60 issues, [John] Byrne revitalized the title and began a run that is considered second-best only to the original Lee and Kirby period. With virtually complete creative control, Byrne managed to better [Roy] Thomas’s efforts at bringing back the vintage feel of the title, whilst taking chances with the format of the book’ Human Torch. More significantly, the renamed Invisible Woman’s powers were enhanced, and the group’s costumes were modified. Such changes, along with expansive storylines featuring the fate of Galactus, are fondly remembered by fandom, and are considered a high point in the series. After Byrne, the series went through various writer / artist teams, including such luminaries as Walt
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Simonson, before Jim Lee arrived and refitted the title for the 1990s. Although not as celebrated as other periods in the comics’ history, Lee’s effort under the Heroes Reborn banner did somewhat revive the title whilst developing, rather than ignoring previous continuity. With the title now showing its age, it was clear that the problems experienced by DC many years earlier over the relevance of its characters was now extant at Marvel. After several years of mediocrity and restarts, the former World’s Greatest Comic Magazine once again had to go back to basics, and play to the series’ strengths – thankfully recently arrived creators such as Carlos Pacheco, Adam Warren and Mark Waid understood the sense of fun and interplay between the leads and their vast roster of supporting characters. In the 2000s, the Fantastic Four appeared as part of the Ultimate imprint in the Ultimate Fantastic Four, which, like other titles in the series, was effectively an alternative universe conceit, that focused on younger versions of the foursome. The series lasted sixty issues, but the ideas underpinning it would
be revised and rehashed in the following decade with FF and the NOW! version of the book which introduced a Fantastic Four with a completely different lineup. It was during this decade, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the ascendant, that two Fantastic Four movies were produced, but by 20th Century Fox. Neither were terrible, but both suffered from dumbed-down characterisation, weak acting (in one or two cases) and miscasting in terms of the chief super-villain, Dr. Doom
(Julian McMahon). It seemed that the studio didn’t want to take chances and opted for a dated cartoon version of the team which lacked any drama, intensity, grit or strong characterization, especially in the case of Michael Chiklis’s The Thing. The sequel, featuring the Silver Surfer (Doug Jones), was marginally better despite the studio’s copout regarding the (off screen) Galactus character. The two movies were quickly forgotten in the slipstream of the dominant MCU (which allowed Chris Evans, the actor who played the Human Torch, to star as Captain America several years later, where he certainly fared much better). Over the last decade, attempts were made to both tinker with and revitalize the franchise, with 2011’s revamp of the team as The Future Foundation, involving a change of costumes and personnel, with SpiderMan joining. The following year Marvel brought back the Fantastic
Four title’s original numbering, and the return of Johnny Storm. The “FF” title became a parallel book as it detailed the adventures of the junior members of the cast. There were further revamps in the middle of the decade, overseen by Matt Fraction and then James Robinson, both offering fresh takes that retained all vestiges of continuity. By the end of Robinson’s run the team had once again gone their separate ways before the next obligatory reset. It was Dan Slott’s tenure on the title, beginning in 2018, that rejuvenated matters and brought strong sales back to the franchise and yet more deviations within the formula, such as the development of a new superteam connected to the original in the Fantastix. With the MCU continuing its supremacy at the box office, attempts were made to both reboot and merge the FF film franchise with
the aforementioned behemoth – in 2015, director Josh Trank produced a third FF movie, based on the Ultimate version, but this received poor critical notices and garnered dismal returns in cinemas – a mere six years later, the movie is barely thought of as part of the canon. With Disney acquiring the entire inventory of 21st Century Fox in the latter part of the decade, the possibility of having an FF film as part of the MCU became a reality, and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige confirmed that there would be a new movie of the super-team, produced by SpiderMan director and writer Jon Watts. Due presumably to current events the project has been delayed, but it looks as if a motion picture worthy of the Fantastic Four may finally hit screens. Fingers crossed that this time, audiences will get to experience the best elements of the World’s Greatest Comics Magazine. TW
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Dan Slott TW: What explains the longevity of the Fantastic Four? DS: They are the first characters of the Marvel Age. Yes, there were a whole slew of characters from back in the days when Marvel was known as Timely Comics (characters like Captain America, the original Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner). But there was a massive shift to have comics were done in the 1960s. It was the start of the Mighty Marvel way of portraying heroes. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby veered away from characters that were modern day gods and paragons and, in the Fantastic Four, created heroes that had feet of clay and all the kinds of relatable, human flaws that your friends and family had. Before there was Spider-Man or the X-Men or Iron Man… there was the FF. TW: How would you describe what the FF is boiled down to one or two sentences? DS: They’re the super powered family. And, yeah, they’ll look out for you, fight bad guys, and save the world,
John Byrne
but what they’re really about is using their powers and special gifts to explore all the mysteries of the cosmos.
TRIPWIRE: What explains the longevity of the Fantastic Four? JOHN BYRNE: There was a time that would have been easier to answer. The groundwork laid by Lee and Kirby was so solid it was hard to go wrong. Since then, I sometimes get the feeling they’re running on fumes.
TW: How have the characters adapted to and evolved with the times over the past 60 years? DS: Honestly, they haven’t. The Fantastic Four are at their best when they stay true to themselves and don’t try to reinvent their look and feel for whatever the current zeitgeist is. In their own way, that makes them timeless and accessible to an audience of any era.
TW How important do you think it was that Ben Grimm, the Thing, was a Jewish character? JB: It’s something I wish I had thought of! But it was added to the mythos so late I can’t imagine it had much effect.
TW: How are they still relevant sixty years after they were first created? DS: We see ourselves in them. There’s no such thing as a “functional family”. We’re all dysfunctional. We all get on each other’s nerves from time to time. But the families we make or find for ourselves, we all love each other very much. Everyone comes from some kind of family unit—and there’s always some aspect of the FF where we can see ourselves in them.
TW: How would you describe what the FF is boiled down to one or two sentences? JB: They’re the family we all wish we belong to.
optimistic vision of the future.
1. What explains the longevity of the Fantastic Four?
TW: How have the characters evolved with the times over the past 60 years? WS: I don’t have an answer for this question because I haven’t followed the book since I left it myself in 1991. But I certainly took my cue for the title from the Lee/Kirby work. I think in a lot of ways, families then are families now.
TW: What ithe FF is boiled down to one or two sentences? WS: I don’t know about the FF as they are portrayed these day as I haven’t kept up with the comic. In the beginning, the Fantastic Four, to me, were a tight knit family whose internal dramas and conflicts played out, and were often reflected by, their struggles against the bad guys in a world where science was seen as encouraging and abetting an 42 TRIPWIRE
TW: How have the characters adapted to and evolved with the times over the past 60 years? JB: When I was writing them, I tried to be sure they remained culturally aware. Topical references that I hoped would not be seen as time benchmarks. TW: Why do you think Marvel have never quite cracked a successful Fantastic Four on the big screen? JB: Have they even tried? The movies have strayed further and further from the source material.
Brian Michael Bendis
Walter Simonson
WALTER SIMONSON: I think as founding members of the Marvel Universe, the Fantastic Four that Stan and Jack created, however the magic works, are characters readers enjoy spending time with. That’s pretty much true of any long-running successful characters. The FF were created as a tight knit family group, complete with family squabbles, loving reconciliations, and internal relationships that reflect family dynamics readers can recognise.
TW: How are they still relevant sixty years after they were first created? JB: That’s up to the writers. Nostalgia is key to the characters, but the context must be modern.
TW: Why do you think Marvel have never quite cracked a successful Fantastic Four on the big screen? WS: Decent screenplays. And probably it would help if they could borrow some of Kevin Feige’s understanding of what makes superheroes work on screen. TW: How are they still relevant sixty years after they were first created? WS: I think families are always relevant. And as in any ongoing comic that runs for a considerable length of time, presumably the FF continue taking on issues and villains who reflect contemporary fears and concerns.
children who absolutely loved them. They have aged a little better than some of the others from that era. they really do try to capture that whimsical goofy sci-fi core at the heart of the first hundred issues of the FF.
TRIPWIRE: What explains the longevity of the Fantastic Four? BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS: Lee and Kirby nailed it. Then, Like most of the franchises in Marvel and DC they have been constantly curated by creators with a deep affection and affinity for the characters and the premise and the world. we’re talking about creators who bring a lot of their personal truth and family dynamic to the adventures. And although most of the universe sees the avengers franchise as the center and heart of the marvel universe we know it’s the Fantastic Four TW: How would you describe what the FF is boiled down to one or two sentences? BMB: Family. I did it in one word :-) TW: How have the characters evolved with the times over the past 60 years? BMB: Well, as a family dynamic they were already pretty progressive from #1 with references to extended family which is a dynamic most families understand to be truthful. also, it seems to be the one thing that really holds them together. They’ve committed to this family dynamic. They are in this together. The fact that it’s their
powers and responsibilities that holds them together just makes it feel like a science-fiction version of what all of us know to be our family dynamic.
TW:How are they still relevant sixty years after they were first created? BMB: Again, it’s the creators. Everybody who has worked on this book knows that this is the centrepiece of the Marvel universe and by that definition a centrepiece of pop culture. I’ve had many friends work on the book felt such a deep family bond connection or finally found a way they could write about their own family without embarrassing anybody. so it’s a book that always trades on author truth. And somebody put the words ‘the world’s greatest comics magazine’ on the front and we all just decided to act accordingly.
TW: Why do you think Marvel have never quite cracked a successful Fantastic Four on the big screen? BMB: I will politely challenge the premise of your question. Although those early Tim Story movies are not high cinematic masterpieces having recently watch them with my young TRIPWIRE 43
FUNDING YOUR
CREATIVE DREAMS Tripwire’s consulting editor Scott Braden looks at the phenomena of the comics kickstarter and asks a few creators who use it regularly what are its advantages…
C
omic book fans from around the world are no strangers to Kickstarter – an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by Yancey Strickler, Perry Chen, & Charles Adler, the popular organisation maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. In fact, the company’s stated mission is to “help bring creative projects to life.”. And it does just that. But, what percentage of the campaigns launched on Kickstarter to date have been in the comics category? We went to the source and asked Kickstarter’s Director of Publishing & Comics Outreach Oriana Leckert that question, and she said: “Since Kickstarter’s inception in 2009, Comics projects have represented approximately 4 percent of launched campaigns. That may seem pretty tiny, but Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner (bottom right) have used kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms like indiegogo to fund their comics projects like Encore, Pop Kill and many others successfully over the past couple of years
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“The number of Comics projects has been growing steadily each year and has really taken off in the last half-decade; to date for 2021, Comics campaigns represent approximately 10 percent of the total successful projects on the platform” -– Oriana Leckert, KICKSTARTER
Liam Sharp (above) has used kickstarter to fund his comics projects successfully over the past couple of years including his art book Encore and The Unseen Jack Katz. despite being small, the Comics category is really mighty! The number of comics projects has been growing steadily each year and has really taken off in the last half-decade; to date for 2021, Comics campaigns represent approximately 10 percent of the total successful
projects on the platform. Moreover, Comics campaigns consistently see the highest success rate on the entire site: 63 percent of projects in this category reach or exceed their funding goal, as compared to 39 percent site-wide.” We then went to the creators
“Kickstarter is always on the lookout for exceptional projects to feature on the site and through our social platforms. There is no rigid criteria” -Oriana Leckert, KICKSTARTER
– those who truly benefit from Kickstarter crowdfunding – and asked how important was utilizing Kickstarter in financing your project(s)? “Kickstarter has allowed us to pay better page rates to artists and also to get our books professionally coloured,” said David West, part of Accent UK who regularly uses the platform to fund his projects. “I set the target to cover these costs and anything extra we get, which then contributes to the print costs, is a bonus.” “Kickstarting a project and getting support from the people that believe in me and my work and the project is the reason it exists,” said comics veteran Jimmy Palmiotti. “Kickstarter became the most important thing to me these past seven years because of the simple fact that most publishers want to own a percentage of your work. In the case of a publisher like Image Comics, even if they don’t, you have to bring a finished book to them which costs thousands of dollars to put together, with the hope they pick it up. With Kickstarter, the audience gets to vote with their dollars whether something should come to fruition or not. I have been doing Kickstarters since 2014 and each and every time I learn something new, as is the case with my latest on Painkiller Jane.” Tripwire then asked Leckert TRIPWIRE 45
“Creators are sick and tired of giving away ideas to corporations that treat them like disposable talent and fail to include them in the success their ideas bring outside comics.” -JIMMY PALMIOTTI what is the company’s criterion for promoting and funding comic book projects. She said, “Kickstarter is always on the lookout for exceptional projects to feature on the site and through our social platforms. There is no rigid criteria that a campaign must meet to be promoted; we look for well-conceived projects, dynamic project images (ideally without lots of text overlay), clear and compelling campaign stories, realistic funding goals, an interesting spread of rewards, and plenty of exciting imagery. “In my role as the Director of Publishing & Comics Outreach, I spend much of my time strategising with and supporting creators and publishers across the literary landscape, as well as having eyes on all the campaigns that launch in my categories.
And there are plenty of others throughout the company working to find fantastic projects all the time. For publishing and comics projects specifically, creators can also use the hashtag #KickstarterReads or reach out to us at on Twitter to share what you’re working on.” How important does Leckert think it is for comics companies and creators to use Kickstarter as a way to see their four-color dreams become reality? “Kickstarter is proud to provide a path for creators of all stripes to build community and raise funds to support their creative work,” she said. “In publishing and comics, writers, artists, illustrators, and publishers all have had great success bringing their unique, strange, beautiful,
Books like BRZRKR by Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt and Ron Garney from Boom Studios (bottom left) and Nocterra by Scott Snyder and Tony Daniel published by Image (bottom right) have made the kickstarter model work for them
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and compelling literary ideas to life on our platform. We’ve seen a slew of indie publishers run innovative and exciting campaigns like Iron Circus, Z2 Comics, Paper Films, and Cast Iron Books; there’s been an influx of larger, more established publishers in the last few years like Boom! Studios, Skybound Entertainment, and Legendary Comics; and there’s always been a spectacular range of individual comics writers and artists funding incredible books on our platform, like Jeff Smith, Scott Snyder, Ngozi Ukazu, Mira Ong Chua, and Afua Richardson. Kickstarter is a proving ground for beautiful ideas in search of an audience, allowing any kind of comics creator, at any stage of their creative journey, to bring their four-color (or two-color! or black & white! or multicolor!) dreams to life.” With that, we asked Palmiotti why he thinks so many comic book creators are using Kickstarter to fulfill their fourcolor dreams? “Creators are sick and tired of giving away ideas to corporations that treat them like disposable talent and fail to include them in the success their ideas bring outside comics,” he said. “It’s become a joke how terrible the bigger
12 most successful comics kickstarters
Here are the 12 most successful kickstarter campaigns of all time in order of how much they have funded
companies treat us all, and a lot of the smarter people are walking away to do their own thing. This past year we have seen just about every single talent move away from the big two companies and figure out a way to do their own thing. It is long overdue and until these bigger companies learn to share better, it will continue to happen.” West agreed with the one-time architect of the top-selling Marvel Knights line: “I think it’s a great, easy to use, platform and has a good global reach. A lot of comic readers pop on their periodically to see if anything grabs their interest, as I do myself. In these days under Covid, launching a new comic on Kickstarter is a guaranteed event. Trying to time a launch with a real physical event, a comic convention, is fraught with risk. Will the event happen? If it happens will it be well-attended? Kickstarter was very helpful before the pandemic but is doubly so now.” Would Palmiotti and West, respectively, use Kickstarter as a selling tool again? “Yes,” said Palmiotti in the affirmative, “which will be my 20th time.” “In a heartbeat,” added West. TW Visit kickstarter.com
1. BRZRKR, $1,447,212 raised, 14,571 backers 2. Order of the Stick, $1,254,120, 14,952 backers 3. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers boxset, $804,018, 1,584 backers 4. The Witcher: Ronin, $678,036, 15,469 backers 5. Ctrl+Alt+Del 2.0, $110,384, 1,704 backers 6. Check Please! Year 4, $580,099, 6,153 backers 7. The Tomorrow Girl, $534,994, 7,565 backers 8. Ava’s Demon: Reborn, $530,310, 6,650 backers 9. CMON Comics, $501,632, 12,261 backers 10. Lady Death: Sacrificial Annihilation, $480,245, 3,035 backers 11. Lady Death: Cataclysmic Majesty, $426,241, 3,306 backers 12. Check Please! Year 2, $398,520, 5,088 backers TRIPWIRE 47
Tripwire’s consulting editor Scott Braden takes a look at the genesis and development of Portland, Oregon’s Dark Horse Comics, home of titles like Hellboy, Sin City, Umbrella Academy and more, celebrating 35 years of publishing and other media this year …
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h t 5 3 y p p Ha day h t Bir E s r o H k r a D S C I M CO
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F
ounded in 1986 by Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Comics has successfully broadened a unique storytelling medium, while at the same time transforming the company with humble beginnings into an industry mainstay. Now, this Diamond Comic Distributors’ premier publisher is celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2021. Over the years, Dark Horse has published the work of creative legends such as Yoshitaka Amano, Margaret Atwood, Paul Chadwick, Geof Darrow, Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Faith Erin Hicks, Kazuo Koike, Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, Mike Mignola, Frank Miller, Moebius, Chuck Palahniuk, Wendy Pini, and Gerard Way. In addition, Dark Horse has a long tradition of establishing exciting new creative talent throughout all of its divisions. The company has also set the industry standard for quality licensed comics, graphic novels, collectibles, and art books. And even with the loss of such licensed mainstays as Aliens, Conan the Barbarian, Godzilla, Predator, among others, the company still finds itself in the winners circle with such popular offerings based on Masters of the Universe, Stranger Things, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, Dragon Age, James Cameron’s Avatar, Game of Thrones, Mass Effect, StarCraft, The Witcher and Halo. “I am so proud to call Dark Horse
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Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson started his professional life in comics retail (above) Below: Dark Horse have enjoyed successful adaptations of their series like The Mask (bottom left, 1994), Hellboy (2004, bottom centre) and The Umbrella Academy (2018, bottom right) Comics home,” exclaimed creative powerhouse Brian Michael Bendis. “From Dark Horse Presents all the way up to Black Hammer, Dark Horse has been at the forefront of the kind of creator-owned comics I personally adore and aspire to.” While other com]ic book companies
seemed to be moving in slow motion, Dark Horse flew headlong into Hollywood with its own Barb Wire, Dr. Giggles, and The Mask films, along with newer creator-fuelled streaming releases: Way’s The Umbrella Academy and Lemire’s Black Hammer. Also, Matt Wagner’s Grendel can be added to
those Dark Horse properties making their way to other media with a Grendel Netflix TV show just announced. Among its most popular creatorowned properties is Way’s The Umbrella Academy, which is now readying its third season on Netflix. According to Wikipedia, “The titular team of The Umbrella Academy is described as a ‘dysfunctional family of superheroes’ In the mid-20th century, at the instant of the finishing blow in a cosmic wrestling match, 43 super-powered infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy at the start of the day; it is hinted by a character implied to be God that they are collectively a modern-day incarnation of the Messiah. Sir Reginald Hargreeves, a.k.a. The Monocle, an extraterrestrial disguised as a famous entrepreneur, adopts seven of the children and prepares them to save the world from an unspecified threat as the Umbrella Academy.” Then, of course, there is Lemire’s Black Hammer that chronicles the title’s namesake champion and six other superheroes saving Spiral City from the Anti-God a decade ago, but in the process became trapped in Rockwood, a timeless Twilight Zone-ish town. Shortly after the heroes arrived, Black Hammer died. In the present, the six heroes live on Black Hammer farm with very little hope of ever escaping Rockwood. This has also been picked up for media outside the four-color panels of comics. Looking back at the honored comic book company over its many fourcolor phases and experiments, the publisher’s Comics’ Greatest World titles (later called the “Dark Horse
‘Among its most popular creator-owned properties is Way’s The Umbrella Academy, which is now readying its third season on Netflix… Then, of course, there is Lemire’s Black Hammer that chronicles the title’s namesake champion and six other superheroes’ Heroes” line) arguably failed to garner a larger readership on its own, it didn’t change the fact that the line’s crossovers with other properties proved to find substantial sales success and great fan appeal. The Ghost/Hellboy Special twoparter has proven to be one of the more successful Comics’ Greatest World
crossovers ever, having been collected in a prestige format book that continues to generate great collector interest in the comic book aftermarket. A reason for this may be that the tale – which had Hellboy travel to Arcadia to see if Ghost was, in truth, a honest-to-God gun-toting apparition and femme fatale – wasn’t just a special one-off featuring comic book legend Mike Mignola’s “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator,” but in fact an important chapter in the Hellboy canon. The unlikely heroine Ghost also found herself teaming up with her DC Comics’ counterpart, Batgirl, as well as the classic pulp hero, The Shadow. In other news, there was even supposed to be a crossover between Mike Baron & Steve Rude’s Nexus and Vortex, but the project was canceled before release – remaining a “Lost Tale” to this day. In July 1995, Dark Horse Comics pitted its size-changing sentinel against Toho’s King of the Monsters in the fan-favorite match-up, Godzilla Versus Hero Zero #1. After this must-have one-shot, and within the “Dark Horse Heroes” mythos, San Diego, California – and its world-famous comic book convention – would never be the same. One month later, the “Hunting the Heroes: The Predators Attack!” event was released to a virtual standing ovation by comic book fans everywhere. An intercompany crossover of self-contained stories, the Hunting the Heroes: The Predators Attack! event ran through all four of the comic book publisher’s August 1995-dated Dark Horse Heroes titles. The participating comic book issues included: Agents of Law #6, Ghost #5, Motorhead #1, and X #18. The TRIPWIRE 51
individual action-packed stories were unrelated and could be read in any order, but collectively revolved around a group of Predators arriving on Earth and hunting Dark Horse Comics’ homegrown heroes. It is no secret that Dark Horse Comics was aiming for significant financial success with this crossover event. Although the first crossover between 20th Century Fox’s Predator franchise and another property in comics was the ever-popular Aliens vs. Predator strip that began in Dark Horse Comics’ award-winning anthology title, Dark Horse Presents, in the late 1980s, it was the alien hunter’s first meeting with the “Distinguished Competition’s” resident Dark Knight in late ’91 (a story that proved successful years before the “Dark Horse Heroes” event) that
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‘Then, there was Dark Horse’s Legend imprint, overseen by actual comic book legends John Byrne and Frank Miller. Launched in 1994, Legend was an avenue for creator-owned projects.’ captured the imaginations of those who loved both the comics and the films. Written by Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons and illustrated by the ultra-talented brothers Adam and Andy Kubert (X-Men and Wolverine, respectively), the three-issue Batman Versus Predator mini-series proved the immense monetary potential that could be found by teaming Fox’s interstellar killing machines with a comic book publisher’s hero – or heroes – of choice. In layman’s terms, it brought wads of cash to the crossover’s publishers, retailers, and distributors – as well as major cache to the characters themselves. To further make this highly anticipated crossover even more desirable to comic book buyers, Dark Horse Comics enlisted top talent to produce eye-catching covers in an effort to make its books stand out on the shelves. The acclaimed cover artists enlisted to add to the crossover’s overall sales potential included Simon Bisley on Motorhead, Adam Hughes on Ghost, Frank Miller on X, and the team of Doug Wheatley & Mark Farmer on Agents of Law. By the culmination of the event, although the alien hunters were defeated by the majority of Dark Horse
Comics’ heroes and heretics, the megalomaniacal Law (first introduced in Division 13 #1), as well as his title Agents of Law, both met their untimely end at the hands of the Predators. A onetime continuation of the series Catalyst: Agents of Change, the cancelled Agents of Law focused on a powerful individual of dubious motives who took over Golden City. Although the “Hunting the Heroes: The Predators Attack!” event was never collected in either a hardcover or trade paperback edition by Dark Horse Comics, the individual issues are still affordable enough that both loyal Predator and/or “Comics’ Greatest World” fans – or even new readers just wanting to enjoy a fun, thrilling read – can get their hands on all four issues of the crossover by searching them out at well-stocked comic book specialty stores the world over. Then, there was Dark Horse’s Legend imprint, overseen by actual comic book legends John Byrne and Frank Miller. Launched in 1994, Legend was an avenue for creator-owned projects. Joining the comics veterans were hot artists and writers Art Adams, Mike Allred, Paul Chadwick, Geof Darrow, Dave Gibbons, Mike Mignola, and Walter Simonson (who originally was part of Malibu’s Legend equivalent, Bravura). The imprint’s logo – designed by Mignola – was an Easter Island Moai statue. Originally, the characters created by Byrne for the Legend imprint shared a universe with Adams’ Monkeyman and O’Brien (their arch-villain, The
Shrewmanoid, battled Byrne’s Babe). Mignola’s Hellboy characters were also part of this shared universe, since Byrne’s Torch of Liberty was present for Baby Hellboy’s arrival on Earth. A much older Hellboy was present for the gathering of heroes seen in the pages of Byrne’s Danger Unlimited #4, and his second, the amphibious agent Abe Sapien, aided Babe during her second adventure. However, later events in Hellboy’s mythos suggest, without explicitly stating, that “the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator’s” version of events has shifted out of sync with Byrne’s costumed adventurers. For example, The Torch of Liberty was fazed out of Hellboy continuity in the manmonster’s R-rated film – Anung Rama’s third – and had been replaced with
Mignola’s own pulp vigilante, Lobster Johnson.” The “Legend” brand didn’t stop with comics, though. In fact, besides three cult-fave films, Mignola’s Hellboy also ended up in board and collectible card games, in OVAs, and as hit action figures and Funko POPs. Miller’s 300 and Sin City also ended up as a series of films, respectively, while the dark denizens of “Basin City” ended up as highly sought-after action figures. And, Miller and Darrow’s The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot were picked up by FOX Television, with accompanying Hardees/Carl Jr’s Restaurants toy meals and Bandai toys following. In any case, when you multiply these examples of super-heroics with manga, fantasy, and much, much more, Dark Horse has successfully transformed itself into a comix giant. And God bless them for it! TW
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Top 10 Dark Horse Characters
Here’s 10 of its most memorable properties over its history including one translated character…
appearance in one of Comico’s books but it was its publication through Dark Horse that brought it to people’s attention. Along with Mage, it displayed why Wagner is one of the most talented and versatile modern comic creators and this is headed to Netflix now too.
1. Hellboy
Created by Mike Mignola back in 1995, Hellboy has gone on to capture the imagination of fans on the comics page and even in two cult movies starring Ron Perlman and a number of animated TV films.
2. Marv, Sin City
After acclaimed runs on Daredevil and Batman, Frank Miller went back to the source with this hardboiled series. Its star, Marv, was a damaged private eye straight out of the pages of Chandler. Sin City spun off into two successful movies as well made by Robert Rodriguez.
3. Concrete
Paul Chadwick’s drama with a difference about a man whose brain was transplanted by aliens into a giant concrete body 54 TRIPWIRE
explored what it was to be human. It was one of the company’s first properties to be noticed.
4. Ogami Itto, Lone Wolf & Cub
Lone Wolf & Cub was one of the first manga strips to be translated. Originally published by First Comics, Dark Horse
picked it up in the 1990s. Itto is the legendary ronin wandering Edo era Japan with son Daigoro. Lone Wolf & Cub offered a cinematic comic experience influenced by the films of Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.
5. Grendel
Matt Wagner’s epic historical drama may have seen its first
6. Black Hammer
Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston’s love letter to superheroes instantly engaged with readers. Stuck in an alternate universe with the myth of the missing Black Hammer hero at its centre, Black Hammer has spun out into various connected comic series at Dark Horse but inevitably it is also heading to TV and possibly film too. Lemire is a modern comics phenomena who shows no sign of stopping.
constant interplay and bickering between them makes for a genuinely interesting comic and TV show.
8. The Mask
One of the earlier Dark Horse characters, created by Mike Richardson and drawn by Doug Mahnke, this madcap hero created quite a stir as Jim Carrey starred in two movies and there was even an animated series based on him.
9. Baltimore
First appearing in novel Baltimore or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Vampire, created by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, Lord
Baltimore is a vampire hunter in the mould of Van Helsing. Yet again, Mignola displays his wonderfully gothic sensibilities and Golden, no stranger to horror, brings his own grisly lightness of touch to the stories he is involved with.
10. Ghost
Dark Horse’s Comics Greatest World was an attempt to create a line of superheroes that were distinctly their own. It didn’t quite take off but supernatural female hero Ghost, originally drawn by Adam Hughes, had a lengthy run in the 1990s and it also featured the work of such popular artists as Terry Dodson, Matt Haley and John Cassaday.
7. Umbrella Academy
Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s dysfunctional superfamily made the jump to TV already with two seasons on Netflix and a third confirmed. A group of estranged siblings discover that they have strange powers after the sudden death of their father and the TRIPWIRE 55
Mike Richardson Dark Horse’s Publisher talks about the company’s milestone anniversary
35 Years In Covers
Dark Horse has had many memorable covers over the years and here’s 15 of the best…
Richardson taken in 2017 at his office pic: Portland Business Journal
TRIPWIRE: How do you feel now that Dark Horse has hit its 35th anniversary? MIKE RICHARDSON: I feel very good about the company. We’ve learned a lot along the way, but I think we’ve had an undeniable impact on the comics industry, both from the perspective of creators and their rights, and the publishing side across various categories. TW: How much has the industry changed since DH was launched? MR: It’s almost unrecognisable when compared to the comics industry of the mid ‘80s. When we started there were 19 Direct Market comics distributors. A creator’s’ right to own his own creations was recognised by a few forward thinking companies but was difficult and certainly not the norm. In those days, if you wanted to get into the comics business, odds were that you had to move to New York. There were no digital comics. Comics customers were overwhelmingly male. Traditional book distributors were not really interested in comics. Traditional bookstores weren’t very interested either. I could keep going but you get the idea. TW: And how much has Dark Horse changed since it was started? MR: When we first started we were a two person operation and we began with two titles, Randy Stradley and myself. Our first books were edited and pasted up on the counter of one of my comic shops. Now we are a full fledged publishing, entertainment, and product company with over 170 employees and growing fast. Additionally, the company was founded on this principal and we are still 100% committed to our creator rights positions. TW
Visit Dark Horse’s home online www.darkhorse.com
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TRIPWIRE 57
Portraits With Character For almost thirty years, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows has been taking photos of comic and genre creators. So we thought it would be fun to look back on a few of them in this magazine
Liam Sharp, Portsmouth, May 2019 58 TRIPWIRE
Alan Moore, Gosh, London, July 2010 TRIPWIRE 59
Bill Sienkiewicz, New York Comic Con, Oct 2018
Walter Simonson, Lucca, Italy, Oct 2018
William Simpson, Portsmouth Comic Con May 2019 60 TRIPWIRE
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William Simpson (2000AD, Game Of Thrones), Portsmouth Comic Con May 2019 62 TRIPWIRE
Christopher Fowler (Writer, Bryant & May), King’s Cross, London, Feb 2010 TRIPWIRE 63
Dave McKean (artist-illustrator, The Sandman, Violent Cases, Raptor), Kent, Feb 2010
Kieron Gillen (writer, Wicked + Divine, Die, Eternals), Soho, London, 2015 64 TRIPWIRE
Guillermo del Toro (director, The Shape Of Water, Hellboy), Covent Garden, London, 2009 TRIPWIRE 65
Richard Taylor (Head, Weta Workshop, The Hobbit, Lord Of The Rings, Planet Of The Apes), New York Comic Con, 2014 66 TRIPWIRE
Andy Serkis (actor-director, The Hobbit, Lord Of The Rings, Planet Of The Apes), New York Comic Con, 2016
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Simon Davis (artist and illustrator, 2000AD), London, 2015 68 TRIPWIRE
Louise Simonson (writer-editor, X-Factor, Man Of Steel), Lucca, Italy, October 2018
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UNIVERSALLY LOVED MONSTERS AND OTHER STRANGE BEASTS
‘Many of the pioneering practitioners of the American horror movie were Jewish emigres from Nazi Germany who had honed their skills at the revolutionary UFA studios in Berlin.‘ literature of the previous centuries. They are more ingenious and even scarier and spookier than much of the cliche dross that has passed for ‘horror’ ever since. Such cinema landmarks invariably influenced the succeeding 90-odd years of horror in all its forms and there are a number of reasons for this. Cinema was in its relative infancy in the early 1930s, meaning filmmakers were much more adventurous and inventive when deploying the tools of the medium. They were still exploring and experimenting with the burgeoning grammar of cinema, and horror was the ideal vehicle with which to take such risks, often consisting of fantastic special effects, complex cinematography and weird sound and vision(s). Many of the pioneering practitioners of the American horror movie were Jewish emigres from Nazi
Germany who had honed their skills at the revolutionary UFA studios in Berlin. (Birthplace of the 1927 SF masterpiece Metropolis.) As the emigres escaped to Hollywood in the early ‘30s, they brought with them a unique animus and sensibility: the influence of the avant-garde art movement German Expressionism. This was an aesthetic and psychological philosophy which turned out to be not just essential for the emerging horror film genre but also hugely influential to the chiaroscurodappled Film Noirs of the 1940s and ‘50s, which in turn shared many of the same dark and disturbing tropes. Apart from parallels with a few outstanding American films of the silent era like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the German Expressionist trend also maintained a symbiotic relationship with pioneering Scandinavian film horror. But early German triumphs like
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) were the templates, visually and plot-wise, for their American descendants Frankenstein and Dracula, both made in 1931. These two latter films were instantly, massively popular and led the way to a unique cinematic multiverse lasting up to the late 1950s, with multiple iterations and productions. (Universal Studios, who own the copyrighted designs and versions of said film monsters have since tried to bring them back in a series akin to the intertextual Marvel Cinematic Universe, but to no avail. Undoubtedly one of the reasons for this is the paucity of imagination in modern day film-making.) In a broader sense, many modern horrors have drawn on the psychological underpinnings, haunting folklore and fractured realities of silent and early-Talkie film horror.
Tripwire’s contributing writer James DC takes a look at the continued appeal and influence of seminal horror movies released under the Universal Pictures banner…
T
he extraordinary canon of monster movies which were produced by Hollywood’s Universal Studios, spanning the 1930s to the 1950s, was unprecedented and remains a high-water mark in the history of world cinema. The following will not analyse in detail the films themselves, because a book the size of the Bible would be needed. Rather I will summarise the influence and impact of this phenomenon of 20th century Art and leave you, the reader, to discover the films afterwards: no words can adequately describe the grotesque beauty and sublime visions they reveal. As a child in Britain in the mid1970s, I experienced a glorious pop culture epiphany when my mother 70 TRIPWIRE
‘As a child in Britain in the mid-1970s, I experienced a glorious pop culture epiphany when my mother let me stay up late to watch the old horror films on TV. ‘ let me stay up late to watch the old horror films on TV. Many were part of the legendary, lamented late night double bills every Saturday night on the BBC, and our weekly excitement and anticipation for the unseen gems to come was unbridled. In those revelatory moments I discovered the core films that were by then already iconic masterpieces of the horror genre: Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein
(1934). Such magnificent jewels nestle among a host of stablemates not so fine-hewn, but which nevertheless sparkle in the quagmire of endlessly dull or inane copycats. (‘But where is Dracula, of 1931?’ I hear you ask. Well, I’ve left it out of my selection because it’s surprisingly inferior, even though it was a box office smash at the time.) These evergreen classics revolved around archetypal European monsters like vampires and werewolves and were based on the legendary horror TRIPWIRE 71
For instance Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby is partly a throwback, in style and substance, to hallucinatory films like the Swedish Häxan (1922), about medieval Devil worship and witchcraft. There are countless other examples but two recent, similarthemed movies are Cold Skin (2017) and The Lighthouse (2019). They clearly are brethren of the Gothic-infused classics of the 1920s and ‘30s, but regrettably Cold Skin is a superficial and immature folly with amphibious monsters who are blatant copies of The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and little else. Whereas the powerful The Lighthouse does away with manifest
latter combines enough originality with respect for the old ideas to be afforded a place in the cinematic genealogy of the Universal horror cannon. Another reason the best Universal films are so magnificent is that horror, in general, was a very different pop cultural beast when they were produced 90-odd years ago. Nascent cinema at the turn of the century was still intimately linked to other, more traditional art forms like the novel, painting and theatre. By implication, the horror expressed through these age-old art forms was more directly related to the symbolic resonance of ancient folk tales or occult narratives.
monsters, instead concentrating on the nebulous psychological terrors of prolonged isolation, which ultimately leads to the mutually assured psychic implosion of the two protagonists. Both films wear their phantasmagorical influences on their sleeves but only the
In other words, because the Universal films were by degrees closer to an older type of untrammelled and primal horror the scarier, more genuine and thrilling they were. As the decades wore on and the inevitable dire sequels (like the 1943 car crash Frankenstein
‘In the late 1950s and early ‘60s two simultaneous strands of visually similar horror films began to take shape. The first out of the gate were the British Hammer Horror productions, the ‘creature features’ which lasted from the late 1950s until the mid-70s. ‘ 72 TRIPWIRE
Meets the Wolf Man) piled up, such potency gradually became diluted and cliche, until we reached the point today where the vast majority of new horrors are anything but ‘new’. To be sure, the ever-increasing rise of Western rationality and science, coupled with the conceptual abstractions of postindustrial Modernity, also played a role in unfastening us, as a society, from the primordial spectres which once stalked our conscious minds.Despite humanity’s inexorable trajectory towards logic and away from superstition and religion, horror films like the Universal set were most adept at projecting people’s archetypal demons back at them; thus awakening their subconscious fears and perverse desires via the lens of ostensibly ‘safe’ dramatic entertainment. If nothing else, they have given vital form and energy to the atavistic ancestral memories of human consciousness. Myriad hybrid sub-genres of filmic horror have developed since the inception of cinema over 125 years ago. Over the decades they have subtly affected and influenced each other, interweaving in complex ways. As to the Universal monster canon, there may be other particular films more strongly related to them (like the celebrated Val Lewton produced horrors of the 1940s) but a number of interlinked ‘sequenced’ films were often closer in spirit. I will briefly elucidate two of these, below. In the late 1950s and early ‘60s two simultaneous strands of thematically and visually similar horror films began to take shape. The first out of the gate were the British Hammer Horror productions, the ‘creature features’ which lasted from roughly the late 1950s until the mid-70s. In 1957 we saw the beginning of the cycle with The Curse of Frankenstein. It was another retelling of the foundational
Frankenstein myth, first loosed upon the world in 1818 by Mary Shelley. However, apart from the fundamental notion of ‘humanity playing God’, it drew upon the groundbreaking 1931 James Whale film more than the trailblazing yet rather stilted novel. In terms of style and dynamics, it judiciously borrowed elements from the Whale version, as well as conspicuously negating or twisting them in order to appear prototypical. Either way, Boris Karloff’s timeless portrayal of the monster was like a Black Hole around which everything else gravitated towards, like it or not. To this end, one of Hammer’s selling points was to effectively proclaim to the audience: ‘Look! We can create a Frankenstein monster as aweinspiring and ingenious as the lauded original!’. No doubt this was sheer hubris because nothing could ever come near the incredible prosthetics of the glowering and jaundiced Karloff iteration. The production team also added vibrant Technicolour to the process so that the blood and gore would look as authentic, and thus as terrifying, as possible. The coup de grâce was getting the superbly intense actor Peter Cushing to play the role of the deranged creator and as the inevitable sequels followed, in step with the Universal series, they became more about him rather than the monster (which was deliberately averse to the Karloff monster-focused films, and which arguably made them weaker). Then in 1958, Christopher Lee took on the mantle of the equally famous vampire count in Dracula. Once more there was a concerted effort to respond, however elliptically or obscurely, to the previous (Bela Lugosi) version. Lee also promptly became a household name, and the rest is history (to indulge that well-worn phrase). The Wolf Man, The Mummy and other old monsters followed suit and got a makeover,
via Hammer. From then on, all of the ghouls, fiends and ghosts which Universal had originally galvanised in the ‘30s went into overdrive, as Hammer - and television re-runs reminded the world of them. Suffice it to say that another Bible-sized book could be written about the plethora of toys, games, model kits, comic books, sweets and a zillion film and TV variations, from the Japanese-made 1965 Frankenstein Conquers the World (in which O’l Frankie fights Godzilla) to the popular TV comedy The Munsters (1964 - ‘66), and everything in between. And that’s not even counting the rest of the Universal monster crew. Such iconic characters may be slowly fading from our shared cultural memory as newer and more disposable fads take their place among the ‘hipper than thou’ youth, but old geezer-nerds like myself will keep the flame burning as long as possible: as Frankenstein’s monster once said: ‘Fire Good!’ The other major pop culture event which drew upon and indirectly referenced the classic Universal horrors was the roster of films produced and directed, between the years of 1960 and 1965, by the Hollywood maverick Roger Corman. The eight films in his series were adapted from the short stories of the 19th century writer of phantasmagorical and Gothic tales Edgar Allan Poe, who was a
‘The iconic Universal monster films are still enormously influential … I predict they will remain forever undead and walking proud ‘
contemporary of Mary Shelly and just as radical and brilliant. For me, Poe is probably the best horror writer who ever lived and most of Corman’s versions pay the requisite respect to the central ideas and motifs of this genius author, even if they typically aren’t that faithful to the specific plots. There are no ostensible creatures or monsters but there are plenty of supernatural forces and deliciously demonic figures who traverse the Freudian landscapes of the id; as did the wicked and tortured souls of the old-school monsters before them. Universal had also made three Poe-inspired films: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935), the latter two starring their principle stars Karloff and Lugosi. Karloff would later reprise a Poe role in Corman’s The Raven (1963), effectively ‘squaring the Pentagram’. In essence Corman cleverly and flamboyantly acknowledged his artistic debt to the seminal ‘30s horrors by reinvigorating certain facets, concepts and indeed the self-same actors, over a period of Baroque, ambitious films. The iconic Universal monster films are still enormously influential and despite the many appalling, listless iterations of the modern era, I predict they will remain forever undead and walking proud. There can be little doubt to anyone with but a smattering of intelligence and a genuine passion for cinema (let alone the specific horror genre) that one of the greatest films ever made is The Bride of Frankenstein, of 1934. If the old-school Universal Studios had only ever given the world this one chalice of overflowing joy, we would still be spoiled rotten. And if you’ve never properly seen it, or any of its cinematic siblings, then what are you waiting for? TW
Universal Classic Monsters: Icons of Horror’ Ultra HD Blu-ray box set is available now. TRIPWIRE 73
LOOKING SHARP
British writer-artist Liam Sharp, who finished a run on DC’s The Green Lantern earlier this year, spoke to Tripwire’s contributing writer Tim Hayes about three decades in comics and what’s next for him. Photo: Joel Meadows…
period working for Marvel, including Death’s Head II and then the Hulk. Did you feel under a lot of pressure? LS: Death’s Head II, who I designed as well as drew, opened all kinds of doors at Marvel, and I ended up doing some X-Men work, Venom, Spider-Man, and perhaps most memorably Incredible Hulk. But a set of very unhappy circumstances resulted in my losing the Hulk gig, which was heartbreaking. I was struggling at the time with a lot of selfdoubt and what turned out to be clinical depression, though it wasn’t until much later I knew enough to do anything about that. They were different times. People knew less, and there was still a lot of stigma. TW: You drew Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer character in a series from Verotik, with Simon Bisley also involved. How easily did that art style, the barbarian masculinity and the violence, come to you? LS: There was a sense at the time that comics were quite rock-n-roll, and that was briefly
TRIPWIRE: You did your first 2000AD work, a Future Shock, when you were just a teenager, and then drew Judge Dredd soon afterwards. When you look at that early art now, can you still see yourself in there? LIAM SHARP:I think I may have been 18 when I drew that Future Shock. I was still working with Don Lawrence, and he pushed me on the layouts that 74 TRIPWIRE
I was drawing. And yes, I can still see myself in that work. I also remember being shocked by how hard it was once I was actually out in the world, doing this work. There’s no way of preparing yourself for what it’s like to do page after page, every day. I don’t think I knew, until I was actually doing it, how incredibly hard this business is. TW: It lead to a high-profile
“Death’s Head II, who I designed as well as drew, opened all kinds of doors at Marvel, and I ended up doing some X-Men work, Venom, Spider-Man, and perhaps most memorably Incredible Hulk.”
Death Dealer drawn by Liam Sharp for Glenn Danzig’s Verotik was published in the 1990s
quite intoxicating. I adored Simon’s work, and of course Frazetta too, and it seemed like a more adult approach to comics - if not actually more mature, as would become selfevident. The archetypes in the art represented everything I was not: brash, fearless, unmoved by what anybody thought of
him, and drawing that work was unleashing some inner demons for sure. Simon was the absolute king of that style, and I don’t think I realised how much I was trying to keep up with his natural mania. And the comic was often very funny too. To me, there was always a sense of parody in that Verotik work; TRIPWIRE 75
have written and drawn some work for DC too, like the Brave And The Bold series with Batman and Wonder Woman which was a beautiful piece of work. LS: I’ve always written. I have two published novels, and a further three novels due to be published next year, so writing is a huge passion for me. I have a six issue script with another artist currently waiting to be started,
“When the chance to do Wonder Woman presented itself I was overjoyed. I felt I had largely been forgotten by the mainstream comic audience.” the bigger, bolder and more utterly mental it got, the funnier it seemed. But then I discovered that a lot of people took all the ultra-violence very seriously, which made me reconsider. TW: For the last several years you have done a lot of work for DC, and your profile there has been high ever since you and Greg Rucka took over one strand of the Wonder Woman Rebirth series in 2016. LS: When the chance to do Wonder Woman presented itself I was overjoyed. I felt I had largely been forgotten by the mainstream comic audience. 76 TRIPWIRE
In 2008 I had done the bestselling comic of the year, Gears of War, which sold 400,000 copies of issue #1; but that was largely down to the gamer community and ignored by most comic fans. With Rebirth, Wonder Woman had never been so big, thanks to the added timing of her appearance in the Batman vs. Superman film and then her own standalone movie, and I was suddenly in the spotlight again. It was a proper comeback. It is very hard to feel like your relevance is being slowly sapped away from you. You sense your audience dwindle,
and stop seeing your comics in the stores. There was a horrible time when no comic store I walked into had anything of mine on the shelves anywhere, which makes you begin to question everything. It’s crushing really, and I know I’m not alone in that. So suddenly being the Wonder Woman artist gave me a huge shot in the arm. It galvanised me, and focussed me, and I was determined to give it everything I had. TW: You clearly have a very strong relationship with DC now, drawing The Green Lantern with Grant Morrison and Batman: Reptilian with Garth Ennis, a series which proved to be strong meat to some Batman readers.
LS: I think Batman: Reptilian was fun because it allowed me to revisit certain elements of my earlier work, as well as that late 1980s/early 1990s era of books like Arkham Asylum and Judgment on Gotham. It’s darkly comedic, as you would expect from my old mate Garth Ennis, and Batman is very much a creature of shadow. It’s also the first time I’ve done a six issue series featuring a major DC character in a fully painted style. I’m so delighted DC went for it, but it’s a book that DC Editor In Chief Marie Javins had been saving for me for a few years. The original intention had been for Steve Dillon to draw it, and Garth and Marie wanted to “keep it in the family.” Garth, myself and Steve often met up for drinks over the years, in London, New York, even Ireland, and we were good friends, so I was an obvious choice. TW: As well as working from other people’s scripts, you
much more in the future, but it can be hard to sell scripts as an artist. I think people find it hard to separate the words from the pictures, or to imagine somebody else drawing your words. TW: Alongside your comics work, you were also the driving force behind a crowdfunded collection of work by artist Jack Katz, a significant figure in indie comics who isn’t spoken of much today. LS: I was a big fan of Jack’s work, and then I met him about four or five years ago when he turned out to live locally. But I found he was living in pretty dire straits. He does not care about money at all, to his own detriment, and at 94 he relies upon the kindness of others to take care of his worldly needs. He showed me all this incredible work that has never been published, just stored in boxes and bags and old portfolios, and I hatched a plan to get
and I will shortly be working on Star Henge: The Book of Merlin, which is the first six issues of a planned 24 (or more) issue epic due out in April 2022. That one is very exciting for me, and touches on all the things I love: fantasy, historical and mythological references, and pure epic sci-fi. I plan to write TRIPWIRE 77
“Jack wants his work presented free of editorial interference, and it’s a tough read… It’s visual poetry, with aspirations of spiritual and pseudoscientific revelation. All about as far from a commercial work as it is possible to be, so I think platforms like Kickstarter present opportunities for work such as this to be seen.” those stories out there with the help of a group of well-known current inkers and artists. All the funds have gone to Jack, and he got a lovely book out of the deal too. He has tons more material awaiting another publisher willing to take up the challenge, and I hope that they do. TW: Kickstarter and crowdfunding as a publishing route is a complex topic with pros and cons, but in the Katz case did it allow something to happen which
just wasn’t going to happen any other way? LS: Absolutely. Jack Katz is uncompromising in his vision, and his work is deeply idiosyncratic. He’s also dyslexic, which means translating his work without impacting Jack’s distinct and sometimes fairly impenetrable vision is not for the faint hearted. It can seem like William Blake: didactic and obtuse, but also visionary. And then there’s all the nudity, which seems
Art from Sharp’s forthcoming Star Henge series coming from Image Comics in 2022 78 TRIPWIRE
to be more of a problem in the US than in the European market. Jack wants his work presented free of editorial interference, and it’s a tough read, particularly his most recent work which is verging on dadaism or postmodernism. It’s visual poetry, with aspirations of spiritual and pseudo-scientific revelation. All about as far from a commercial work as it is possible to be, so I think platforms like Kickstarter present opportunities for work such as this to be seen. TW: What other crowdfunded projects do you have underway now, and what’s the motivation behind them? LS: I have a set of three art books underway. The first campaign, a selection of my favourite works, already ran, but we will be selling copies through my website. The second will be all black and white art, and the third will be a long, deep dive into my whole career. It felt like the right time to put out a comprehensive overview of what is now a 35-year career. TW: With that 35 years of experience behind you, do you think artists are appropriately recognised for their contributions to comics, now that comics-adjacent fiction dominates pop culture? LS: No they certainly are not. People have no general concept of how hard what we do is. It’s extreme art. Comics are a performance, and the entire cast has to act. We are the costume and concept designers and have to draw absolutely anything asked of us, whether it’s to our strengths or not. We have to invent cities
and precarious medium. But I can think of few as creative, exciting, and ultimately rewarding. It’s a beautiful medium, still, I think, in an infancy of promise. TW: And how can comics realise that promise? LS: I love comics that chomp at the fringes of the possible, reaching into the unknown. I don’t believe there are right or wrong tools for anything that masquerades as art or aspires to be art, and art has to evolve and and conceptual vehicles in an push and challenge. This is a instant, on the spot. There’s pretty big deal for me, as I think no pre-production, you just we’re in danger of forgetting that. jump straight in. And we do it My daughter Matylda graduated because we love it; because we, from the Academy of Art in San ourselves, are fans too. It’s why Francisco, where she was told we are here. But then there are she should work on developing people that just want to take one identifiable style. I hate that! you down, and undermine or How is that art, to only be seen ridicule or belittle your efforts. for one facet of what we might be It’s just throwaway material to able to do? them, a momentary distraction. When I read a script, I try to So no, I do not think we are think: how does this feel? How generally appreciated or does it look? What’s the tone? If compensated as we should be. it’s a horror is it murky browns, There are, of course, superstar or deep cobalt blue? Or is it exceptions, but generally it’s more stark black and white? Is not the luxurious life outsiders this Green Lantern story a space might imagine. I’m hugely opera with vast star-speckled appreciative of the people that night vistas, or a gleaming have followed my work all this futurist dazzle of impossible time, and of the people who cities? Is this superhero story a are still just finding me. That high-energy slugfest all about support is our lifeblood. Only extreme anatomy, or a quiet the crazy would get into such an character study working as an uncompromising, ever-shifting allegory? All of these things will have a bearing on the colour, “I think we should stop the technique, the storytelling forcing artists into approach - as they should. boxes and let them I think we should stop forcing spread their creative artists into boxes and let them wings. That way we will spread their creative wings. That really see what this way we will really see what this glorious medium can be. glorious medium can be. We We will be encouraging will be encouraging it to evolve it to evolve again.” TW again. TRIPWIRE 79
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
THE
POWER LIST 2021
Back again a nine-year-absence, Tripwire presents the latest Power List in association with Beyond Kuiper The Galactic Star Alliance. Forty key figures in the worlds of comics, film, TV and genre, this list has been assembled from the various writers of Tripwire. These are the key luminaries of their respective fields, many of which overlap with one another. Of course readers can disagree with us but that’s part of the fun of lists like this...
40 JOE QUESADA
Quesada was Marvel’s editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2011 but he is still the company’s executive vice president and creative director. Quesada just won a Lifetime Achievement Ringo award in Oct at the Baltimore Comic Con so he is still an influential figure in the comics industry.
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39 PAUL LEVITZ
Levitz left DC in 2009 but he certainly hasn’t let the grass grow under his feet. Returning to his work as a writer on both non-fiction books and comic series like Visitor for Valiant, Levitz is now on the board of directors at Boom Studios. He is also a great unofficial ambassador for comics and still a very talented writer.
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38 JASON KINGSLEY, REBELLION The UK has a number of influential indie publishers like Time Bomb Comics, Accent UK and others but in terms of mainstream comics houses, Rebellion is still the publisher of the home of Judge Dredd, 2000AD. It also runs its own film and TV studio in Oxfordshire.
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34 ROBERT KIRKMAN, SKYBOUND
The Walking Dead may not be as popular as it once was but with a second spin-off The World Beyond running its second season this year and another new TWD show coming after the main show ends with its eleventh season this year, the concepts aren’t going anywhere soon. Invincible’s animated adaptation on Amazon Prime is getting a second season too. Tech Jacket and Fire Power are still very popular Image titles too.
31 MIKE RICHARDSON, DARK HORSE The year 2021 has seen Dark Horse Comics publisher Mike Richardson continue to cement the company’s reputation in its 35th anniversary year – building on hits like Umbrella Academy, Black Hammer and Hellboy. The Comixology deal for the Scott Snyder line of books was a very canny move too as was grabbing Brian Michael Bendis from DC.
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33 DIRK MAGGS
Maggs has had quite a year and a half. The British audio writer and director launched Audible’s The Sandman Part One, based on Gaiman and co’s Vertigo series, in summer 2020 and this autumn saw Part Two come out. Both of these audio adaptations are New York Times best-sellers and during the pandemic, projects like these were safe alternatives to film and TV work. He has a CV that goes back decades too which doesn’t hurt.
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Titan, along with Rebellion, is the UK’s most prominent mainstream comics publisher. Titan is also part of the same company that owns Forbidden Planet Limited which started back in 1978. Titan publishes a range of licensed titles and graphic novels including Doctor Who and Blade Runner. Landau is co-owner.
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BUDDY SAUNDERS, MYCOMIC SHOP.COM
Founder of Texas’ Lone Star Comics, in 2013, Saunders switched to MyComicShop.com online and he has never looked back. Boasting the world’s biggest selection of US comic books, Mycomicshop.com is a massive success story thanks to the tenacity of Saunders.
CHIP MOSHER COMIXOLOGY Comixology is pretty much the only game in town when it comes to digital comics but in recent years it has expanded to creating its line of Originals. Helmed by Mosher, the line has attracted the likes of Jock, Andy Diggle, Alex Segura, Erica Schultz and Johnnie Christmas. The recent deal with Scott Snyder and Dark Horse only helped to cement its reputation.
BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH
Windsor-Smith has been away from the limelight for decades but the publication of his original graphic novel Monsters from Fantagraphics/ Jonathan Cape has pushed him back out there. The book has won plaudits and awards in 2021 so his name is back on the map again as a creator of bold, dynamic comics work.
LIAM SHARP
The British writer-artist Sharp has had a phenomenal couple of years. Thanks to his work on DC’s Brave and The Bold: Batman/ Wonder Woman and two years on The Green Lantern with writer Grant Morrison,. Sharp is now very firmly on the A-list of comics talent. With a huge kickstarter campaign for his art book Encore successfully funded and new Image book coming in 2022, his star is definitely on the rise.
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WASSEL BROTHERS, VAULT
The brothers Wassel started Vault in 2016 and in only five years they have created one of comics’ most intriguing and thought-provoking companies. With books like These Savage Shores, The Plot and Giga winning critical and fan acclaim, Vault is definitely a place that has gone from strength to strength in a very short time indeed. Vault also won a second Tripwire Award this year.
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NICK LANDAU, TITAN COMICS
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Axel Alonso was a driving force for DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint In its prime, and brought a new generation of comics and creators to Marvel Comics in the early 2000s. Now he’s aiding Bill Jemas at investor’s favourite AWA and attracting creators like Peter Milligan, Rob Williams, Benjamin Percy and others with brand-new series and concepts. AWA launched at the height of the pandemic but with Old Haunts picked up for film, the company is definitely one to watch.
ROB LEVIN, VALIANT
Levin moved from Humanoids to head up Valiant Comics as its executive editor. Levin used to work for Top Cow and DC as a consultant and so he brings quite an impressive pedigree to this role. Valiant has built up quite a buzz in recent years and Levin may be the one to improve its profile publicly.
26 MIKE MIGNOLA
Hellboy is still one of Dark Horse’s main staples and in the company’s 35th anniversary year, he is still a very prominent staple of their output and their backlist. Mignola continues to write new tales of the character with other artists like Adam Hughes. Also he has just co-written Hellboy and The BPRD 1950s miniseries this year and crowdfunded documentary Drawing Monsters will take a look at the genesis, creation and evolution of Hellboy. Mignola is still a name to be reckoned with.
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IN ASSOCIATION WITH
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BILL SIENKIEWICZ
ZACK SNYDER
Hype and controversy are no strangers to filmmaker Zach Snyder. The director raised his profile with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which attracted a lot of attention and viewers when it was shown on HBO Max in the US and Sky Movies in the UK. 2021 saw him release zombie heist movie Army Of The Dead and its prequel Army Of Thieves on Netflix. He continues to be a figure of influence in the world of genre
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Starting his career back in the 1980s, it is his work on movie posters and his exceptional cover art that has put him on our list. The man with the hardest name to pronounce in comics is still subverting the form with a style all his own. No one composes covers like him and his presence on a project instantly gives it a touch of extra gravitas. He has just been confirmed as the cover artist on a new Dune movie tie-in adaptation too and Moon Knight, the book he came to prominence on, is coming to Disney Plus next year
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ERIC STEPHENSON, IMAGE
Image’s publisher and chief creative officer Stephenson has had an amazing year, with the company seeing continuing hits like The Department Of Truth and new ones like Gunslinger Spawn. Image slipped to Diamond Comic Distributors’ third biggest comic publisher after DC but still very impressive. Stephenson continues to be their ace in the hole.
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Marvel is still number one in the comics publisher charts at Diamond and 2021 has seen hit TV shows with Marvel’s name all over them like WandaVision, Loki and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier all at Disney Plus. Also Marvel have returned to the cinema with Black Widow and ShangChi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, both making decent money at the box office. Marvel’s comics are now carried by Penguin Random House and the House of Ideas doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere soon.
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RAM V
Ram V has had quite a year with his The Swamp Thing series with artist Mike Perkins for DC winning plaudits and The Many Deaths Of Laila Star for Boom getting lots of positive reviews. Also, his new Vault series Radio Apocalypse coming this autumn reteaming him with artist Anand RK will only help to cement his name.
JEFF LEMIRE
Lemire has had a pretty amazing year with the debut of Netflix’s adaptation of his DC series Sweet Tooth proving to be a big hit. There’s also been more Black Hammer comics coming from Dark Horse, still in development for film and TV. He’s also launched a new series at Dark Horse, Mazebook, and another one, Primordial with artist and Gideon Falls collaborator Andrea Sorrentino at Image. Lemire is still one of the most in-demand people in comics.
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Another new entry in this year’s list with Rob Levin is kickstarter’s director of publihshing and comics outreach Oriana Leckert. With kickstarter now a major part of many comic publishers and independent creators (see our piece in this very issue) her role has become a lot more significant over the past twelve months. Many of the most interesting comic series have and will continue to appear on this funding platform.
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DAVID HYDE
David Hyde used to be DC’s marketing director and in 2013 he launched his own PR and marketing company Superfan Promotions. In eight years, he has built it up to become the pre-eminent company offering these services and it now includes his former DC workmate Pamela Horvath Mullin and Hanna Bahedry working with him. Hyde is one of those behind the scenes figures that shapes our industry.
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DC has had a rather tumultuous year with more rounds of layoffs this summer but Lee is still there. AT&T hasn’t made life easy for the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman but Lee is now the last of those at the top of the DC hierarchy (Didio, Johns, Harras) who is still there. He is still a man of influence and 2022 sees a new Batman film which usually helps to boost the company. The Discovery deal may change the landscape again too.
13 GERARD WAY
The former My Chemical Romance frontman is still firing on all cylinders thanks to the success of Dark Horse’s Umbrella Academy, which he created with Gabriel Ba. A third season is coming for the TV show and Umbrella Academy is one of the big genre hits of Netflix since it launched just in 2019. My Chemical Romance is also still a very popular band too despite the fact that it hasn’t been a going concern since 2013.
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MATT KINDT
Kindt has had quite a year with Boom’s huge BZRKR series drawn by Ron Garney and created by Keanu Reeves. Thanks to this success, he can basically write his own ticket with future projects. His Dept H series from Dark Horse appears to be heading to Netflix too which will help his profile over the next couple of years.
12 JIMMY PALMIOTTI & AMANDA CONNER
Palmiotti and Conner are the ultimate comics power couple, a pair who can write and draw. Plus Palmiotti has now launched so many crowdfunding campaigns that we’ve lost count. Palmiotti was always a very talented creator especially a writer but his kickstarter successes prove just what a canny businessman he is as well. Conner is still very much an in-demnand artist too.
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TODD MCFARLANE
Besides continuing his role as one of the prime movers of the incredibly successful Image Comics, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn expanded in 2021. We had King Spawn and Gunslinger Spawn launch over the past year with the latter breaking sales records. He’s still a major player in comics, which is not bad at all considering that Spawn launched almost 30 years ago.
11 MIKE NEGIN, REED
Negin is the man who runs ReedPop’s comic shows like New York Comic Con and C2E2 in Chicago. Coming back after two years away thanks to the pandemic, Negin is someone who can attract the top talent at ReedPop’s events and still make them feel safe. The UK’s MCM London Comic Con, also part of Reedpop since 2017, is also back with a vengeance. Negin is arguably the most influential figure in the world of comic cons currently.
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STEVE GEPPI, DIAMOND
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ORIANA LECKERT, KICKSTARTER
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JIM LEE
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CB CEBULSKI
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JAMES TYNION IV
MARIE JAVINS
Javins has risen rapidly at DC since she joined back in 2014 from group editor and she is now editor-in-chief of the company. A year on from being made EIC, DC seems to have come out of the pandemic in a fairly strong position and Javins has played a major role in this. We have had DC’s virtual FanDome event doing well in 2020 and 2021 too.
It has been a phenomenal year for James Tynion IV with Image’s Department of Truth which he co-created with artist Martin Simmonds still a huge book. Something Is Killing The Children at Boom is also still a massive hit and he has just begin publishing his creator-owned work digitally through platform Substack. He still keeps his hand in at DC though with Joker and horror book The Nice House On The Lake.
When it appeared comics were going to go dark because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. President CEO Stephen A. Geppi, Sr. was a beacon of light for retailers around the world last year. Geppi also runs Gemstone Publishing. Diamond have lost DC and Marvel and now IDW has left too but Geppi continues to make Diamond a force to be reckoned with by emphasising the bigger names that are still with them like Dark Horse. Diamond aren’t going anywhere soon.
SCOTT SNYDER
Snyder has also had an amazing year with the Comixology Originals/ Dark Horse publishing deal announced. Showing that a new comics publishing industry requires a new mindset, he brought some of the best artistic talent to collaborate with him on a line of top quality books. He hasn’t looked back since he left DC.
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BOOM Studios has recently diversified into film. With properties like Klaus, Something is Killing the Children, Faithless, BRZRKR, Once & Future among others, there are a lot of irons in the fire. BRZRKR was a huge boost for him too. Even though he has stepped back from day-to-day activities at the company, replaced by Paul Levitz, he is still very much an major player in the comics industry.
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NEIL GAIMAN
The co-creator of DC’s cult comic The Sandman, the last two years have seen his star rise thanks to the hit Audible adaptation of the aforementioned comic. With Netflix also in production with Gaiman’s The Sandman coming in 2022, an Anansi Boys TV show at Amazon and a second run of his and the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, he is a nobrainer for this list again in 2021.
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5 KEVIN FEIGE, MARVEL
He was the man who helped to build up Marvel Studios into a massive worldwide brand with a huge box office to match. Now in charge of Marvel TV since last year, this year has seen a number of Disney Plus hits like Wandavision, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and Loki on Disney Plus. 2021 also saw Marvel back in cinemas with Black Widow and Shang-Chi and The Legends Of The Ten Rings. 2022 has the studio releasing Doctor Strange: In The Multiverse Of Madness.
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Celebrating The Best In Comics Talent On 26 August at London’s Cartoon Museum, in Fitzrovia, the results of the third annual Tripwire Awards were announced in front of a live audience. Co-hosted by The Convention Collective’s Leonard Sultana and Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows, here’s all the nominations and the winners from the night…
JON FAVREAU
TAIKA WAITITI
In around six years, Waititi has gone from a cult comedy figure to one of the most influential players in modern film. Thor: Ragnarok made $853m at the world box office back in 2017 and he has gone from strength to strength since then. He has appeared in Disney Plus’ successful The Mandalorian show and is finishing up another Thor movie, Love and Thunder, out next year. He is also attached to a Star Wars cinematic film as well.
DAVE FILONI
Filoni has moved from running the Star Wars animated universe, making his reputation there, to becoming part of the growing live-action stable at Star Wars too. This year saw new animated show Star Wars: The Bad Batch produced by Filoni but he is also involved in The Mandalorian. He is seen as the soul of modern-day Star Wars.
Favreau has always been a very canny operator, improving his profile through helming two of Marvel’s Iron Man films. Thanks to the success of Disney Plus’ Star Wars spin-off show The Mandalorian, which he is showrunner on, he has parlayed his clout into something even bigger. Now we have The Book Of Boba Fett fron December, it is likely that his profile will continue to rise.
1 KEANU REEVES This year’s top spot is taken by a man who is a huge Hollywood star who made the move into comics with the hugely successful BRZRKR series at Boom this year. That comic is coming to film too with Reeves involved. 2021 also sees him back as Neo in The Matrix: Resurrections out in December. With a fourth John Wick coming in May next year, Reeves continues to be a modern genre phenomena. 84 TRIPWIRE
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Best Writer Sponsored By Image Comics Ram V (The Swamp Thing / Catwoman – DC Comics) Kelly Thompson (Captain Marvel, Marvel Comics) David F Walker (Bitter Root – Image Comics) James Tynion IV (The Department Of Truth – Image Comics) Winner: Al Ewing (The Immortal Hulk – Marvel Comics / We Only Find Them When They’re Dead – BOOM! Studios)
Best Artist Sponsored By Time Bomb Comics Martin Simmonds (The Department Of Truth – Image Comics) Stephanie Hans (DIE – Image Comics) Tommy Lee Edwards (Grendel Kentucky – AWA) Esad Ribic (The Eternals – Marvel Comics) Winner: Liam Sharp (The Green Lantern – DC Comics)
Best Cover Artist Sponsored by Ace Comics Jen Bartel Olivier Coipel Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau Art Adams Winner: Joelle Jones
Best Colourist Marte Garcia (S.W.O.R.D. – Marvel Comics) Matt Hollingsworth (Spider-Man Spider’s Shadow – Marvel Comics) Mike Spicer (The Swamp Thing – DC Comics) Dave Stewart (Black Hammer – Dark Horse Comics) Winner: Jordie Bellaire (Headlopper – Image Comics / Batman – DC Comics)
Best Letterer Clayton Cowles (Warhammer 40K – Marvel Comics) Todd Klein (Batman: Creature Of The Night – DC Comics) Ed Dukeshire (Blacking Out) Tom Orzechowski (Spawn, Image) Winner: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (Undone By Blood - Aftershock)
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Best New Series Sponsored By Dark Horse Comics The Other History Of The DC Universe (John Ridley / Various Artists – DC Comics) The Swamp Thing (Ram V/ Mike Perkins – DC Comics) Second Coming (Mark Russell / Richard Pace – AHOY Comics) Space Bastards (Eric Peterson / Joe Aubrey / Darick Robertson – Humanoids) Winner: The Department Of Truth (James Tynion IV/ Martin Simmonds – Image Comics) Best Publisher Sponsored by Modern Fanatic Humanoids DC Comics Dark Horse Comics Aftershock Comics Winner: Image Comics
Best New Talent Sponsored by The Convention Collective Sayra Begum Jamal Campbell Jeff McComsey German Ponce Winner: Stephanie Phillips
Best Original Graphic Novel Sponsored By Aftershock Comics Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History (David F. Walker / Marcus Kwame Anderson – Penguin/Random House) Reckless (Ed Brubaker / Sean Phillips – Image Comics) Infinitum (Tim Fielder – Harper Collins) Blue In Green (Ram V / Anand RK – Image Comics) Winner: Monsters (Barry Windsor-Smith – Fantagraphics Books/ Vintage Books) Best Collection Conan: Serpent War (Marvel) The Trigan Empire Vol.2 (Rebellion) Outer Darkness/ Chew (Image) Empyre (Marvel) Winner: Black Hammer: Library Edition Vol.2 (Dark Horse)
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Best Crowdfunding Campaign Sponsored By Modern Fanatic Nocterra by Scott Snyder and Tony S Daniel Blacking Out by Chip Mosher and Peter Krause Palomino by Stephan Franck Pop Kill by Jimmy Palmiotti, Dave Johnson and Juan Santacruz Winner: BRZRKR by Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt and Ron Garney
Best Comics Related Website/ Publications Sponsored By Modern Fanatic Newsarama The Comics Beat The Comics Journal Comic Book Resources Winner: DownTheTubes
Best Small Press/ Independent -UK Sponsored by Knockabout Comics BHP Publishing Soaring Penguin Press Self Made Hero Time Bomb Comics Winner: Titan Comics
Best Small Press/ Independent – US Sponsored By Modern Fanatic Valiant Comics Dynamite Editions Magnetic Press Black Mask Studios Winner: Vault Comics
Person Of The Year Kevin Smith Ross Richie Eric Stephenson John Freeman Winner: Marie Javins
The Roll Of Honour Alan Grant Grant Morrison Denny O’Neil Dave Gibbons Richard Corben Bill Sienkiewicz Joe Kubert John Wagner Winners: Grant Morrison, Bill Sienkiewicz
Best Editor Sponsored By Modern Fanatic Brady Webb Rachel Fulton Ben Abernathy Tom Peyer Winner: Karen Berger
Best Digital Comics The Red Hook: Blackout by Dean Haspiel Hotelfred.com by Roger Langridge King’s Ransom by Louise Simonson and Jan Duursema Batman: Legends Of The Dark Knight by various Winner: Quarantine comix by Rachael Smith
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CLAWS
Tripwire’s film and DVD editor Stephen Dalton takes a look at John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London the year it celebrates its 40th birthday
AND EFFECT
40 Years Of An American Werewolf In London
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face-chomping, blood-spurting, fleshripping landmark in low-budget horrorcomedy, An American Werewolf in London turns 40 this year. Written and directed by a 30-year-old John Landis, who was fresh from breakthrough success with Animal House (1978) and The Blues Brothers (1980), this genrebusting saga of lycanthropic lunacy opened to mixed reviews and mass walk-outs from audiences expecting another light-hearted comic romp. But the film soon acquired an enduring cult following, winning an Oscar for Rick Baker’s groundbreaking prosthetic make-up effects and inspiring several generations of famous fans, from Michael Jackson to Guillermo del Toro, Neil Gaiman and Edgar Wright. Watching American Werewolf four decades later, it still delivers fresh joys, both as a witty reboot of classic monster-movie folklore and a handsome time capsule of an alluringly shabby, pre-gentrification London. Indeed, one of the nostalgic pleasures of revisiting this seminal creature feature in 2021 is seeing
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‘Watching American Werewolf four decades later, it still delivers fresh joys, both as a witty reboot of classic monstermovie folklore and a handsome time capsule of an alluringly shabby, pregentrification London.’ areas like Soho, Belgravia and Putney at the dawn of the Thatcher era, with their wild-haired punks and goths, red phone boxes and vintage Routemaster buses, seedy porn cinemas and quaint neon signs. The end credits even include a cheerfully bizarre dedication to Prince Charles and Lady Diana, who announced their engagement during the shoot. The filth and the furry are all part of the evergreen appeal of this Nightmare on Regent Street. American Werewolf co-stars David Naughton and Griffin Dunne as hapless young American backpackers, David Kessler and Jack Goodman, whose European vacation ends in tragedy when they are attacked by a mysterious beast during a rain-sodden nocturnal hike across the Yorkshire Moors. The Brecon Beacons in mid-Wales stand in for Yorkshire, lending the film
its bleakly beautiful opening panorama. Jack is killed in the attack but David survives, waking from a coma in a London hospital three weeks later. Catching the eye of nurse Alex Price (Jenny Agutter), who later becomes his lover, David is haunted by gory hallucinations of the undead Jack, who warns his old friend that he is cursed to become a slavering hellhound during the next full moon. “Kill yourself before you kill others,” implores Jack as his face degenerates into a queasy mass of slashed, dangling, rotting flesh. David ignores him, of course, and undergoes one of the most visually stunning transformations in predigital cinema. Beware the moon. The eerie real-life inspiration TRIPWIRE 91
for American Werewolf came to Landis in his late teens while working as a production assistant on Brian G. Hutton’s World War II gold-heist caper Kelly’s Heroes (1970), which was filmed in the former Yugoslavia, now Croatia. During the shoot, Landis witnessed a gypsy funeral in which the dead man was wrapped in garlic and buried feet first deep in the ground, his grave then layered with tarmac to prevent his undead spirit comic back from the afterlife. This creepy superstitious ritual struck a dramatic chord with the aspiring young film-maker, and he quickly wrote an early draft of the script. But even after they moved into making films
themselves with their low-budget horror spoof Schlock (1973), Landis and his make-up effects collaborator Rick Baker faced years of rejection from studios and producers before finally securing the modest financial backing for their deranged vulpine fantasy. American Werewolf was not the first film to fruitfully mix horror and comedy. Young Frankenstein (1974), Carry on Screaming (1966), Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy (1955) and many more paved the way. But Landis is one of the first directors to treat both dark humour and visceral violence with equal seriousness. As he told The Guardian in 2017, his inspiration was Universal horror
classic The Wolf Man (1941), which portrayed the werewolf more as tragic victim than monster. “Films tended to show the transformation from man to wolf through dissolves, but I wanted to capture how painful the entire process would be,” he said. “Although the film did have a lot of comedy, I wanted to treat the violence realistically, to make it as terrible as violence always is.” With its stereotypical background chorus cast of bumbling detectives, sexy nurses, dour Yorkshiremen and cheery bobbies on the beat, American Werewolf was partly Landis paying homage to the British cinema and comedy greats he loved, from Ealing Studios to Carry On, Hammer horror
‘But even after they moved into making films themselves, Landis and his make-up effects collaborator Rick Baker faced years of rejection from studios and producers ’ 86 TRIPWIRE 92 TRIPWIRE
to Monty Python. “The great Ealing comedies were all really dark,” Landis told Louder Than War in 2011. “I was definitely honouring those movies but an Ealing comedy would never show violence. They were always very discreet about that.” But shooting in Britain was also a matter of financial pragmatism. Landis was taking advantage of the Eady Levy tax-rebate system which ran from 1957 to 1985, helping to subsidise big international productions like Superman, Star Wars, Alien, Raiders of the Lost Ark and more. On the downside, the US cast and crew faced some major bureaucratic obstacles, with UK union Equity initially only allowing three work permits when Landis needed four: for himself, Baker, Naughton and Dunne. Only after the director threatened to shift the entire shoot to Paris, and even began scouting locations there, was the issue resolved. Landis was emerging as a major commercial comedy director in the
wake of The Blues Brothers, and studio executives pressed him to cast Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in American Werewolf. Instead, he chose Naughton and Dunne, two young actors with barely any screen credits. “I think John wanted to go with unknown people,” Naughton told the Morbidly Beautiful website in 2016. “Our chemistry and the fact that we looked like we were very unsuspecting and innocent victims made us perfect.” For the female lead, Landis approached a more established star, his long-time friend Jenny Agutter. While the adoring, nurturing, sexually accommodating Nurse Price is clearly a male fantasy, she is also unusually well-rounded for a female character in a 1980s slasher movie. “If it hadn’t been Landis, I don’t think I would have done it,” Agutter recalled in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in 2016. “Usually, particularly at that time, women in horror movies were not strong roles. You’d spend your time running
and screaming, and that’s about it.” Landis and his team mostly cast the film’s background characters from the London theatre and comedy circuit. The chorus of frosty Yorkshire locals in the early gathering at the Slaughtered Lamb pub features some familiar faces, including wrestler turned screen heavyweight Brian Glover and Rik Mayall in pre-Young Ones mode. Landis reportedly saw the young comic’s “Dangerous Brothers” double act with Ade Edmondson and offered both of them roles, but only Mayall made the cut. Landis was also troubled by the habit among UK productions of the era of mainly casting white actors and extras. To his credit, the director again challenged industry norms by insisting on hiring a racially diverse cast. As a result, American Werewolf looks more like the real multicultural London than any Richard Curtis film. Of course, some would argue the real star of the film is Rick Baker’s
‘With its stereotypical background chorus cast of bumbling detectives, sexy nurses, dour Yorkshiremen and cheery bobbies on the beat, American Werewolf was partly Landis paying homage to the British cinema and comedy greats he loved, from Ealing Studios to Carry On, Hammer horror to Monty Python ’ TRIPWIRE 93 87 TRIPWIRE
‘Some would argue the real star of American Werewolf is Rick Baker’s innovative prosthetic make-up, which covered a broad spectrum from animatronic skeleton puppets to meticulously glued-on strands of body hair and painstakingly sculpted strips of peeling, putrid human flesh’ innovative prosthetic make-up, which covered a broad spectrum from animatronic skeleton puppets to meticulously glued-on strands of body hair and painstakingly sculpted strips of peeling, putrid human flesh. Landis built the entire film around David’s climactic limb-stretching transformation, which Baker achieved using pneumatic rams operated by cables, plungers and syringes. This show-stopping sequence was filmed by a smaller crew at the end of the 10-week London shoot. “It took six days to shoot the transformation that on the screen is about two minutes,” Naughton recalled in his Morbidly Beautful interview. “I was in the make-up chair for sometimes 10 hours a day before I’d even get out on the set.” Alongside a thumpingly dramatic score by Hollywood legend Elmer Bernstein, American Werewolf also features a cheerfully upbeat jukebox soundtrack that comments ironically on the action, a technique later emulated by younger film-makers like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright. Landis managed to secure three versions of the vintage ballad ‘Blue Moon’: by Bobby Vinton, Sam Cooke and the Marcels. Sadly, both the Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan covers proved unattainable. Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’ and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad
Moon Rising’ also feature, but Cat Stevens refused to allow the use of his song ‘Moon Shadow’. As a recent convert to Islam, he was wary of his music featuring in a racy comedy with supernatural themes. According to Dunne, Stevens declined “because he believed that werewolves really existed.” American Werewolf arrived in cinemas in August 1981, earning mixed reviews, but it made an enduring cultural impact. The film’s groundbreaking lycanthropic transformations led to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences creating a new special make-up effects category, earning Baker the first of his seven Oscars to date. Michael Jackson was certainly impressed by the film, hiring Landis and Baker to orchestrate his own monstrous metamorphosis in the lavish landmark video for his 1983 smash hit ‘Thriller’. Alongside its growing reputation as a cult classic, American Werewolf became a solid commercial hit, earning a whopping $62 million on its modest $6 million budget. It helped kick off a mini-revival in lycanthropic horror movies including Wolfen (1981), The Howling (1981) and Teen Wolf (1985). So it was perhaps inevitable that PolyGram Pictures would ask Landis to write a sequel. The bleak, surreal
screenplay he conceived involved Debbie Klein, the unseen mutual friend that David and Jack discuss at the start of the original film, relocating to London to investigate the duo’s mysterious deaths a decade later. But the studio hated it, so Landis dropped the project. In 1997, Disney-owned Hollywood Pictures finally released An American Werewolf in Paris, a charmless CGIheavy semi-sequel directed by Anthony Waller, which opened to universally negative reviews and was rightly soon forgotten. It currently holds an impressively poor seven per cent approval rating on the film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. The closest Landis has yet come to remaking his classic creature feature was when he returned to Britain 30 years later to make the gleefully macabre grave-robbing comedy Burke and Hare (2010), which co-stars Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis alongside several American Werewolf cast veterans including Jenny Agutter, John Woodwine and David Scholfield. Alas, this handsome misfire failed to capture the anarchic spirit of the 1981 original. For decades, Landis ruled out suggestions of remaking American Werewolf, but he seems to have softened on the idea in recent years. In 2016, director Max Landis confirmed
that he was rebooting his father’s film, but that now appears to be in limbo. A growing mutual fanboy connection between Landis and Edgar Wright, who cites American Werewolf as an inspirational favourite, also led to discussions between the two about the British horror-comedy auteur directing a remake. But Wright declined the offer from Landis, apparently on the grounds that the original film is an untouchable classic. Why mess with perfection? “There’s something about this movie that cast a kind of spell on me, and it’s really influenced a lot of my work,” Wright told The Guardian in 2010. “I love how it manages to do several things: it’s laugh-out-loud funny, it’s genuinely very scary, but it’s got a lot of heart as well. You really care about the people in it.” TW
HOW JEWISH IS AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON? as a revered cult film over the last four decades, it has been subject to increasingly academic analysis from authors, film-makers and cultural commentators. One fascinating subtext highlighted by this scholarly scrutiny is the film’s essential Jewishness. Written and directed by an AmericanJewish director, it is sprinkled with Jewish names and references, from jokes about David’s circumcised penis to his terrifying Holocaust-infused nightmares about Nazi demons massacring a suburban Jewish family, one of the film’s most jarringly dark and disturbing sequences. In a 2016 essay for Rolling Stone, Joshua Rothkopf calls American Werewolf “the most exquisitely neurotic - and expressly Jewish - movie in the horror canon.” Rothkopf argues that David’s alienated state as both an undercover wolfman and an American tourist lost in Old Europe works as a powerful allegory of exoticised Jewishness. “Hiding a
A RUNNING JOKE IN LANDIS MOVIES As hardcore Landis fans will know, An American Werewolf in London contains one of the longest-running selfreferential in-jokes jokes in modern cinema. The film’s climactic bloodbath takes place in a seedy porn cinema just off Piccadilly Circus which is screening an X-Rated flick called See You Next Wednesday. Landis actually shot these porno-spoof scenes himself, creating the most fully realised version yet of a fictional film that recurs throughout his entire body of work. Titled after a line of dialogue from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the fictional film See You Next Wednesday grew from a real screenplay written by the young Landis. It proved unfilmable, but he has included 94TRIPWIRE TRIPWIRE 94
secret deep within one’s body, strange urges, xenophobic glances, accusatory feelings of guilt,” he writes. “David’s condition already has a name, and this won’t be the first film in which Jewish otherness is made monstrous.” Filmmaker Jon Spira, who made the enjoyable Star Wars fanboy documentary Elstree 1976 (2015), explored this theme further in his 2019 video essay I Think He’s a Jew: The Werewolf’s Secret. Taking a line of dialogue from American Werewolf as his title, Spira links the Landis film to its cinematic ancestor The Wolf Man (1941), whose Jewish screenwriter Curt Siodmak fled Nazi Gemrny after witnessing first-hand the virulent antisemitism of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. As Siodmak went on to invent most of the filmic folklore now widely accepted as classic lycanthropic legend, the entire werewolf genre could arguably be seen as one huge ever-expanding allegory for Jewish otherness.
winking references to it in all his movies, as well as his other work including the feted video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The joke has even spread beyond the director’s own canon, popping up in Babylon 5, Hellboy II, the Sharknado movie series, Neil Gaiman’s script for the 2013 Doctor Who episode Nightmare in Silver, and other unlikely places. “I wrote a screenplay that was fairly outrageous,” Landis explained to Famous Monsters of Filmland in 2016. “It was kind of an autobiographical phantasmagoria. It was nuts. And it would never get made. It was probably terrible. But I’ve taken or stolen either scenes or gags or dialogue from it, and whenever I do, I make sure the screenplay gets a credit in the movie. So it’s nothing metaphorical or anything. It’s nothing profound. It just means I cannibalised it from an old script.” TRIPWIRE 95 TRIPWIRE 95
From The Archive
Tripwire has existed as a print magazine and as a website since 1992. So we thought it would be fun to dip into our extensive archive and offer readers a small taste of what has gone before both in print and online. First up is our classic Drew Struzan interview from Tripwire #54 from back in 2010… 96 TRIPWIRE
Movie Masterclass
legendary movie poster Drew Struzan artist spoke to Tripwire editor-in-chief Joel Meadows back in 2010 as part of Tripwire #54 and here’s that classic chat where he touches on his entire illustration career. Photos: Mark Berry TRIPWIRE 91
DREW STRUZAN is the last of the movie poster illustrators, creating memorable and distinctive images to grace film advertising for over forty years now. We caught up with him at his home in Los Angeles to talk about the art of the film poster, his career and more… TRIPWIRE: What do you think makes a good film poster? DREW STRUZAN: Well, I think commercially and financially it’s one that gets people interested in the product. The thing about movie posters is that it’s very different from other products. They only have one weekend to sell the idea to come and see what we’ve done. There’s other things like the trailers that keep people interested. But what the poster is supposed to be for initially is to excite people about the possibilities of the movie. So a poster has to tell people something about the spirit of what the director and the story had in mind. So I think a good poster is one that does that: inspires, excites and gives people a sense of the product. But for me personally because when I was doing it, I always had in mind the commercial uses of it. I always thought that art was the perfect medium for that purpose because art historically inspires, excites and motivates people. It keeps them interested and makes them question and makes them want more. So I always tried to take what was basically advertising and turn it into art. So for me I made art whether the client saw it as art. Over the years the response has told me that it worked really well, or at least my concepts have. People collect it, they’ve written me online and sent me things through the mail saying how much they appreciate it. They decorated their lives and it inspired them for years; even after having enjoyed the movie, the posters became something they enjoyed. To me that’s what makes a good poster. TW: So a good film poster will transcend the film that it’s attached to? I don’t have many film posters but I have a Funeral in Berlin poster and I’m an admirer of the Bob Peak stuff and the Italian Hitchcock posters. Should a poster stay with you long after the film sometimes? DS: I know they do for some people. I sit alone at home in my studio, in my own head most of the time. But the reactions I’ve had from other people tell me that they do live on. I think it’s because they do the work of art and it’s part of their 98 TRIPWIRE
my technical abilities. I had worked in advertising and they thought I would be appropriate for the movies. A good movie’s about the human condition so they needed portraits that really spoke to them and to people. They asked me to work in the industry because I had that capacity and, as I learned technically how they were used, what they needed, what they wanted to see and what inspired people. I learned it as I went along. Probably one of the benefits was because I didn’t have historical context for the poster as an object. I just had artistic training and ability and I just brought that to what I was doing. In retrospect, I just did what I liked and because of that it gave a new take on what the poster could be. So it did change the way most people looked at posters and what posters could be because I wasn’t imitating history.
“The thing about movie posters is that it’s very different from other products. They only have one weekend to sell the idea to come and see what we’ve done” lives for many different reasons. It’s not just a remembrance of the film but it becomes something in and of itself. TW: When you first started work as an artist…if you had to pick your five favourite movie posters, the ones that inspired you when you were a kid, what would they be? DS: Well that’s an interesting question.
I didn’t have the typical childhood memories because I didn’t have those experiences. When I got into the business, it wasn’t anything I aspired to do. I fell into it. I was requested to start doing movie posters and I had a lot to learn about their history, their practical use as well as what I could do with them. I didn’t have the ones I knew I liked or even the ones that were a part of my life.
“The reactions I’ve had from other people [to my movie posters] tell me that they do live on. I think it’s because they do the work of art and it’s part of their lives for many different reasons. It’s not just a remembrance of the film but it becomes something in and of itself.” I found it peculiar that other people have that experience even with my work. TW: Did you basically learn on the job once you started getting work? Once you started getting work doing
film posters, you had to go and do the research? DS: Not in the sense that I had to go and start reviewing the history of it. I did have to learn the business though. I was hired initially because of taste and
TW: Was your work on the album covers good grounding for you as an artist to get to work with an art director and to work from a brief? DS: Oh yeah. I actually worked in a studio for a couple of years so I worked with art directors. I saw the jobs come in, what the clients wanted, and I got to understand that. And then I saw them being produced and what the responses were to it. It gave me a good grounding in the job and in the world of commercial illustration. When I started working with directors and producers on videos and movies I knew how to speak with them and understand what they were talking about. I knew how to translate it into my language which is the visual language. So it was a grand experience and training. I went to school where I learnt my skills but I didn’t learn the business until I actually started working in it. TW: So were you a film fan before you started doing the movie posters? DS: Why would I have to be? TW: You didn’t have to be but it comes through in your work. Were you a film fan? DS: I saw very few films as a young person and most of my film experience was watching TV. A lot of the classic movies I thought were in black and white actually were in colour but I never saw them in that. I think what makes me different is I didn’t have any other experiences. So when I got into the movies and started really understanding them and seeing them, it was because I TRIPWIRE 99
remembers. But it wasn’t until I got more and more established that they began to call me directly. Then I became known as the official Indy guy and official Star Wars guy. But it wasn’t a path that was immediate.
collaborated on a Star Wars poster in 1977. How was that experience? I know you collaborated with another artist on it. Was that the only time that you’d collaborated with someone else in such a way? DS: Yeah it was. It was a one-time thing.
“It was Charlie White who had the [Star Wars] job. He was a marvellous airbrush artist… but he didn’t do portraits. He knew my portrait work from the album cover work I did. So he just called and said ‘Do you want to share a painting?’ So I got to watch an airbrush and learn how to do it.” was doing the job. And what made me different was basically my personality. I think I have a sensitivity so when I saw the project, the film or talked to the director I connected with them very quickly.
the fresh perspective — you weren’t bogged down with years of having worked in film — that gave you a fresh pair of eyes that you could approach these things in a different way? DS: That’s exactly what it was.
TW: Was it also because you had
TW: I am going to pick out a couple of big points in your career. You
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TW: How was it collaborating with another artist on a film poster? DS: It was grand because we had mutual respect and so we could communicate, and speak the same language. It was Charlie White who had the job. He was a marvellous airbrush artist, well-known at the time. He painted beautifully but he didn’t do portraits. He knew my portrait work from the album cover work I did. So he just called and said ‘Do you want to share a painting?’ So I’d do the portraits and he’d do all the other stuff. So I said ‘If I do it, will you use the airbrush?’ because I’d never seen an airbrush before. So I got to watch an airbrush and learn how to do it. It was great fun, a learning experience for me and it was a respectful collaboration so it was very special. TW: So did you work directly with Lucas on that or did you work through an art director? DS: No I worked with Charlie White because he had a studio with a number of artists and people working in it. I just worked with him and I didn’t have anything to do with Lucasfilm. It was years and years before I directly connected with Lucasfilm and even longer before I ever met George Lucas.
“So I did Temple of Doom and within a week it became the main poster and that’s the one everyone remembers. But it wasn’t until I got more and more established that they began to call me directly.” TW: Was that for the Indiana Jones work? DS: No a lot of the Indy stuff came out of design studios. It was not until I got established that I dealt with them. There are thousands of artists who’ve painted Star Wars stuff. With that first movie there were loads of paintings done for it
and it was the same for Indy. You didn’t become THE artist immediately. My Raiders was used overseas and then on Temple of Doom they had another artist paint the first one. Then they said ‘let’s get your take on it.’ So I did Temple of Doom and within a week it became the main poster and that’s the one everyone
TW: But the Indiana Jones posters had a very classic look and they were very distinctive. You could tell that it was your work. Was that something you strove for from the beginning of working as a poster artist and as an illustrator? That aficionados would see your work and go ‘That’s a Drew Struzan’? DS: No that didn’t happen (laughs). I was all over the place using different styles and techniques. I didn’t have one thing that I was selling. The Indy thing only became the recognisable style because I kept doing the same thing for Indy as that’s what they liked and they wanted. So over time, my look and my take on Indy became identifiable with me. As I remember it, it wasn’t an Indy legitimate thing unless I did it. I had no foresight about this stuff. It happened later. People will always see it that way and go, ‘Oh he had this great design and this great purpose.’ My purpose was very simple: I wanted to make art and I wanted to make a living. It all happened around me. TW: Do you think working as an illustrator is something that gives you discipline? You’re producing art but to a deadline so you’re forced to focus? Or is it just a necessary evil of what you do? DS: It’s necessary for the industry to TRIPWIRE 101
came out on JC Leyendecker and he’d been kind of forgotten over the years but when the book came out he became very popular again. So everybody wanted a Leyendecker for their artwork. So that’s where my influences came from. So I paint in many styles and techniques but it was the industry that required certain ways of painting; they wanted naturalism. They wanted something you could read from across the street. It’s a poster after all. I gave it the depth that it needed so people could look at it closely and you could live with it for a while but it also had to be the bullseye right in your face that made a good poster. It worked very well for me because I liked iconic images. I just happened to have the taste that worked well in the industry I wound up working in. produce work fast, to think on your feet and be creative. The deadlines didn’t force it. It’s like when I went to school. I went there six days a week, five nights a week. I was carrying a huge load in college and I had to paint pictures for every class every night. It just taught me to be a hard worker and when I got into the industry I didn’t feel it was hard necessarily, it was just a job. I worked through holidays and weekends. Even if I had a broken back and I was sick, that’s what I did. The only difference is that when I paint for myself, I can take my time. I can think about it, change it and live with it for a long time. The only difference with illustration is that you do it, you earn the money and then it goes away. You don’t have a chance to rethink it. I don’t think artistically it made any difference. TW: In terms of other artists influencing you, who would you name? Obviously you’ve been working for so long, so I’m sure it’s become less of an issue these days but, when you first started doing the posters, who would you say were your largest artistic influences? DS: I had a good classic education, drawing and painting. I learnt to paint and draw in all different kinds of styles historically and modern. Then I got into the industry and that’s why I didn’t have my own style. I could paint like anybody and when I was young, they would say ‘We need a Rockwell and he’s not around any more’ so I did a Rockwell. If they said: ‘We need something that looks Art Nouveau’ so I read up on the style which took me to Mucha. When I was working in the record industry, a book 102 TRIPWIRE
established, so I assume you were given a reasonably free hand after you got the brief from the art director? That you were able to turn in the work without too much revision? DS: Well there’s a misconception! (laughs) TW: Well, if you could clear that up… DS: In the movie industry because so much is riding on that one thing and so many people are involved, it’s a very complicated process. So they would read the script, see the film and then they would tell me their concepts and I would give them my own. Then I’d do many sketches, drawings and even paintings, looking for what would please them or what would make them happy. So I’d go through stages and stages and even after they approved a finished composition, they made changes on finished paintings and changed their mind. They changed composition, content and I’d change original art a million times. That’s the one thing people don’t understand what’s very different about the movies compared with other industries is that, for example, with a book cover, I do one drawing, they say ‘fine’ and I paint it. Then they print it. That was very seldom the case with movie posters. TW: So it was often the case that you had multiple revisions even from the original brief that they gave you? DS: There were so many opinions and the movie makers are visual but the advertising people are usually suits, in my opinion. They’re not visual so they’ll tell you what they feel and what they
TW: You were obviously very versatile and able to tailor your style to the particular job and that’s quite a strength as an artist. Did you enjoy the variety of being able to do work in a slightly different style dependent on the job? DS: It was just where I came from, I suppose. Even now, when I’m painting for myself, each picture is different. It’s the inspiration, not the technique or the style that interests me. Is that my life experience or my personality? Nature or nurture? I don’t know. But it’s just what I do and I enjoy changing and mixing styles to suit. TW: By the time you’d done some of your bigger jobs like the Back To The Future stuff, you were fairly
think but they can’t translate it into a picture. Once they see it, they’ll go ‘Oh that but not that’. In my opinion, it’s a wonder to me that anything good ever came out. TW: So do some posters come out as almost consensual because they’re the result of compromise between the studio executives and the art department? The poster may not have been the best idea but it was a consensual compromise between the management and the art directing side? DS: That’s a good thing in some ways because I learnt how to deal with it psychologically. ‘It’s their project and they’re hiring me to do it’. So I learnt how to listen to ideas and make their ideas as good as I possibly could. In doing this, it broadened my outlook, my vision and my abilities to be able to paint and please people. So it made me a more giving and understanding person because it had to. I don’t think it made the posters worse and in many occasions I think it made them better. I like working that way because it made me a better painter as I had to listen to people. I learnt how to paint and connect with people. I think that’s part of the reason why people like the work. I wasn’t just a selfish painter in a closet, painting to please myself. I was painting to please others. TW: If you had to choose the one poster or the one series of posters that you felt was the most successful creatively for you in terms of work for hire for the movie stuff, what would you choose? DS: That would be hard. Part of the reason is because they were changing all the time.Some of the ones that I really liked were the ones that they were the least bothered with, as I see it. When I did Temple of Doom they already had a painting from someone else, so they came to me and said ‘let’s see what you think.’ I did one drawing, they liked it and I painted it and they used it. That was very strong and uncompromising so I thought they would change it. But there were others like Hook which they changed constantly. I worked on that for six months and we still missed the deadline, yet it’s a beautiful, beautiful poster. It cuts both ways. The nature of the movie industry is quite different to almost any other form of illustration. TW: So when you used to do the posters, did you have people sit for
“The only time in almost forty years that I had anyone pose for me was when I did Back To The Future II and III. I actually got to go on the movie set and Michael [J. Fox] and Christopher [Lloyd] actually posed for me.”
you or did you use photographic reference? DS: Yeah sure Harrison Ford sat for me (laughs)… TW: Fair enough. So you must have used reference photos? DS: The only time in almost forty years that I had anyone pose for me was when I did Back To The Future II and III. I actually got to go on the movie set
and Michael [J. Fox] and Christopher [Lloyd] actually posed for me, so I took photographs. I took them home and painted from the portraits I was able to take. But all the rest of the time, it was based upon the movie and the stills they shoot on set. Because by the time I get to them, the movie’s in the can, the actors have moved on and they’re somewhere else in the world. So I had to paint from the reference material. TW: And I assume that you used stunt stand-ins for the body, like artists’ models? DS: Yes, Indy especially. On Coming To America with Eddie Murphy, that’s my body. I put a tuxedo on and my wife took a picture of me, so I just put his head on my body. But that happens a lot with artists. It’s a very common way of working. And if I didn’t have the body to do that, I’d try a friend who had the right build and use them for it. TW: So you’ve retired from doing film posters. What motivated your decision to do that? DS: Like most things in life, it was many reasons that led to me quitting. It was me TRIPWIRE 103
old and tired. It’s a changed industry. Most people are noticing now that something’s happened to the industry, which has changed quite a bit. It started 15 years ago when computers came in and they started using the computer a bit. That was fine, as it was just another medium. What really changed was the way the industry works and the people changed, in my view. At one time they used to have creative people directing artists. They were called art directors and they would put together a team to build the advertising including the artist to paint the one sheet. They had respect and understanding of other
people’s abilities. We all got along well and we created creative things. But then executives started taking over and they didn’t have that sensitivity. So they found with the computer that they could just make orders and say ‘do this and do that’ and they could do hundreds and hundreds, and I’m not exaggerating, of comprehensives and ideas. So what happens when you have too many choices is that people get confused and they don’t know what to choose. They wound up just repeating success based upon financial reasons rather than artistic or specific reasons for films. They’ll work for a month doing comps and they’ll want the finished computer thing overnight. I can’t do 200 comps and I can’t produce a painting overnight. So it changed the whole landscape of what it takes to make a movie poster. So they weren’t using me much anymore and the work I got was from loyal fans like Frank Darabont, Guillermo Del Toro or George Lucas. People like that gave me work and I was getting work from first-time directors. People who’d grown up with my work and always said: ‘When I make a movie, I want you to do my poster.’ Well they finally made the movie so I got to do the poster. But the industry itself wasn’t using me anymore. That changed, I changed and I thought ‘I’ve had a good run. I’ve got grand kids now and I can paint what I want now.’ I’m 63.
I worked directly with my friend, the director and filmmaker and I made a painting that captured the movie. He said: ‘you’ve captured the whole spirit of the movie’ and yet the studios refused to use it. Even though the director had his power and his taste said I made him something nice. They just got used to the new way of doing things and they don’t even want art anymore. But I agree with what you said and many thousands of people around the world would echo your sentiments. But we’re not the people who run the studios.
TW: Is this a permanent change to the industry? Do you think the age of the illustrated movie poster is over? DS: A lot of people have made comments about that but my feeling is that it’s over. I think that once you get people into this, they’re not going to go back.
TW: So you’re painting your own work. What subjects are you painting? DS: Right now I’m painting a picture of my grandson and I just finished one of my wife. Whatever crosses my mind because they’re my focus now.
TW: That’s very sad. DS: I think it is. TW: Because it was such an art. Anybody who has the technical skills can put a film poster together these days, theoretically. And it means that it doesn’t have that same magic and you wouldn’t have that same connection with the poster that you used to have. DS: I completely concur with your thought. That’s how I feel, that’s how I could keep doing it but it changed from being that. I could tell stories about how I did paintings for Pan’s Labyrinth. 104 TRIPWIRE
TW: So the Pan’s Labyrinth piece as never used then? You did a finished painting that never saw the light of day? DS: Yes. And the studio didn’t like one of the things I did for Guillermo on Hellboy. The studio said ‘we don’t want to use that’ so Guillermo printed it up and took it to Comic Con in New York and gave them away to all the fans. So the studio said ‘let’s give it a market test and see what people really think of this image’. Well, they got the highest rating they ever got on one of these market tests and yet they still refused to use it. At least, that’s the way it was told to me. So I just said: ‘What am I supposed to do? I accomplished exactly what I should with the poster and they still didn’t want it’. So I said: ‘There’s no reason for me to be here anymore. I’m beating a dead horse.’
TW: Are you finding it quite liberating? Or does it feel a bit strange after all these years of working with art directors and movie people? Because now the only person who’s directing you is yourself? DS: It’s strange because I think I’m harder to please than they were. TW: You’re your own worst critic? DS: It’s much more difficult than it was doing the other work. But that’s okay because if you go on my website you can see my illustrations as well as my paintings. Responses from people have been comments like: ‘I’ve loved your illustrations over the years but
when I see your paintings I love them even more.’ So I’ve been feeling good recently. It feels nice after being kicked out of the movies. TW: I’m sure you’re not the only person who’s left film after that sort of experience. There must been other artists who’ve had a similar experience… DS: And what should be interesting to you is that it may have started with me but it’s happened all the way down the totem pole, in my view. I have a friend who’s a director and a writer in the industry and he’s made some of the best movies of all time. He goes into the studios with an idea now and they say to him: ‘We have to see your resume to see if you’re capable or not.’ They don’t even know who he is. TW: That’s terrible. DS: I know writers and directors who are having the same difficulties I’ve had but the industry and attitudes have changed. It’s not just me and when I talk to people in other industries, it’s happening there too. It’s happening everywhere. The world is changing. It’s not as sensitive or as friendly. TW: It’s become a lot more corporate and cold. DS: It’s losing its soul. So I felt it and a lot of my friends are feeling the same way. TW: You did a ‘how-to’ DVD last year? DS: Yes, in fact it wasn’t that long ago. It was about four months ago. TW: What was the motivation behind that? DS: It was a number of things. Mostly because for years people had always asked me ‘How do you do that? How do you think about it? How do you accomplish that?’ I’ve explained it over the years at schools and in articles. But there was never really any record of me painting and explaining what I would do. When Guillermo had done the first Hellboy, he said ‘why don’t you film painting it and we’ll put it on the director’s cut DVD?’ But when the DVD came out, they didn’t use it. So I had this film and it just sat there. I had a friend who’d been out of work for a year and his wife had gotten cancer. He’s a film editor and producer and he
“[Movies] are losing their soul. So I felt it and a lot of my friends are feeling the same way..” said: ‘Why don’t we just put together the DVD?’, I said. ‘You can edit it and I’ll narrate it. I’ll do it for you and your wife, you can keep whatever comes of it’. So I was finally able to answer in real depth for all of those people who asked ‘how do you do that?’. I can actually show it to them now and I wanted to do it before I got so far from it that I forgot how I do it. So that was fun and I enjoyed it. So it’s there for all time to say that this is how these things used to be done and it became historical because it isn’t being done anymore. TW: Because you don’t do that work anymore, it’s like a postscript to your career?
DS: Yes and now we’re just finishing up a book out of London, Titan Publishing. They wanted to redo my Oeuvre book but I said ‘What’s the point as that’s already been done?’ So we were talking about all the comps, preparatory work and candids I do. This book is taking some of the betterknown movies and showing all those drawings and all those paintings I did in preparation for the finished paintings. TW: When is that coming out? DS: In July at Comic-Con and worldwide in September. TW: Thanks for your time. TWT
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KIng Of
The Stone Age Here’s our classic chat with the late legend Joe Kubert which ran in Tripwire Annual 2009, out back in in July of that year… TRIPWIRE: This chat is predominantly about Tor with the hardcover out now. How did you feel returning to the character after quite a long time away? JOE KUBERT: Well I find it challenging. I also find it interesting and I’m very happy with the opportunity to be a little bit more innovative, try to build a little bit more credibility into the character, stretch the story a little bit. I find it very enjoyable and I appreciate the fact that I had the opportunity to do it. TW: How has the character changed? Did you sit down and make a conscious decision to flesh out the character? How did you approach returning to the character? JK: In my attempt to make the character more credible and still inject some creativity and imagination into the story, I tried my best to give some rationale, some reasonable justification to the events that occurred. He’s coming into a different place that was completely and totally hidden. This new land that was encircled by mountains, I felt, gave me an opportunity to perhaps give some logical reason for certain animals to have still been existing at this time.It was like finding a lost world so to speak and that was the direction I took it. Again my attempt, since this whole story is taking place during a time that very few of us actually know what happened, was to make it as logical and as reasonable, therefore as credible and believable as possible. TW: When you first created the character back in the 1950s, I presume that Burroughs and Tarzan were big influences on Tor? JK: Well, actually the character gave birth as a caveman Tarzan. I had always been influenced very, very heavily by Foster’s handling of the Tarzan character which to
“I find [returning to Tor] challenging. I also find it interesting and I’m very happy with the opportunity to be a little bit more innovative, try to build a little bit more credibility into the character, stretch the story a little bit” 106 TRIPWIRE
me always seemed regardless of what he was doing, always seemed so completely credible and believable that the story and what happened to the character had an effect on me. The story communicated to me which is exactly what I tried to do with the Tor character, that is to give him emotional reactions that would seem reasonable based on that time, like his connection with the woman. As a matter of fact, there are stories historically documented of children who were born that didn’t look normal and they were shunned. They were put aside or left out in the open to die. So by injecting these kinds of elements into the story, I felt that they become meaningful, they become reasonable and therefore credible and believable. TW: How much historical research did you do in terms of the flora and fauna? JK:I’ve always been fascinated, as most children have, with dinosaurs and those
creatures of that sort. I’ve always been fascinated by that and I’ve read many, many books and have practically lived in the Museum of Natural History for a long time. I’ve done preliminary sketches on that. I’ve always admired the illustrations done by Knight, the wonderful artist who did some of the early drawings of paintings of the dinosaurs based on the archaeological findings. That’s part of the joy of doing what I do, that I’m able to select those stories and the type of characters that interest me and put them down on paper. TW: Because there was such a huge gap between the first run of Tor and the more recent series, did you sit down and think ‘I’m now going to do with the character and the series what I was perhaps not capable enough as an artist to do in the
“Actually Tor gave birth as a caveman Tarzan. I had always been influenced very, very heavily by Foster’s handling of the Tarzan character which to me always seemed so completely credible and believable that the story and what happened to the character had an effect on me” TRIPWIRE 107
“I don’t set a time slot when I sit down to work. My feeling, my sense is however that I feel a little bit more secure about what I’m doing now than when I was younger and so I believe that the work goes a little faster.” person to do the inking, someone else to do the colour and so on and so forth. But I feel very strongly that this dissipates the one direction that a piece of artwork should be taking.
“I’ve always been fascinated, as most children have, with dinosaurs and those creatures of that sort. I’ve always been fascinated by that and I’ve read many, many books and have practically lived in the Museum of Natural History for a long time.” 1950s when I first did Tor’? JK: You’re absolutely right, Joel. Hopefully we all grow and learn as we get older and I certainly thought that was one of the challenges and interesting things that I faced in doing Tor again. Very thankfully, Paul Levitz here at DC gave me the go-ahead to do it and I have pretty much free rein to direct myself at any area that I feel interests me. I’m in a very fortunate position. TW: So you did everything except for the colouring? JK: That’s an interesting point. The fellow who works with me is Pete Carlsson. He is in charge of production for the army books that we’re also contracted for. We do the PS magazine and Pete is a whiz on the computer. I’m a dunce when it comes to working with the computer but he acts as an extension during the colouring of Tor. I actually did the colouring but I could never have done it without Pete’s help. The moment I touch something on the machine it just goes blooey! So Pete is 108 TRIPWIRE
just like an extension of my hand. TW: I noticed that in terms of the colouring, it’s a lot more sympathetic with your linework than say the Sgt Rock book you did with Brian Azzarello. I presume that the colouring has become a little more sophisticated? JK: Thank you. I appreciate that. TW: Looking at Tor, the palette is a lot more subtle. JK: I appreciate that very much. Those are my attempts at colouring because I’m at that machine working it. The longer I get into this stuff that I’m doing, the more I want to control every aspect of it for good or for bad. The lettering is a font that’s actually my lettering that was supplied to me mechanically through the computer but that’s my original lettering. The drawing, the story, the colouring; every aspect of what’s coming out as much as I can control it. I do it because I feel that what I’m creating as far as story and drawing is concerned should be judged on the
basis that this is all my work. Deadlines are a constant that everybody lives with in this business, so it’s necessary under those circumstances very often to get one person to do the pencilling, another
TW: How has your speed changed over the years in terms for example of how long it would take you to draw an issue? JK: That’s an interesting question because I don’t set a time slot when I sit down to work. My feeling, my sense is however that I feel a little bit more secure about what I’m doing now than when I was younger and so I believe that the work goes a little faster. I have gained a certain amount of surenes and commitment. I do barrel ahead on my work. I have no compunctions and no fears about what I’m doing. I don’t second-guess myself at this stage of the game. I feel quite certain about what I want to do, for good or for bad. I’m pretty certain about what I want to put down on the paper, what I want to communicate and I think because of that, I don’t think it’s a matter of physically working faster, I think it’s a matter of being able to make decisions a little faster that enables me to get the work done.
TW: But I presume that the Tor pages were hand-drawn by yourself and then scanned in? JK: I know what I’m trying to do. I’m not quite sure how it communicates to others but nevertheless I know what I’m trying to do. TW: Why do you think Tarzan and adventure still resonate,in light of the fact that it’s the eightieth anniversary of the character in comic strip? JK: I don’t know. To me I can only gauge my personal reaction to old characters like Tarzan. As I said before a man I’d never met or even talked to, Hal Foster, was able to do things in his work that communicated to me very effectively. So very consciously I tried to create the same kind of effect in the work that I do. I think that there’s a spontaneity and a simplicity, in his work that I’m constantly trying to inject in mine. The other aspect to it is that I try to do enough in terms of finishing my drawings where the person who’s reading it actually finishes the art in their own mind themselves. I try to keep my work as simple and as direct as possible and as spontaneous as possible. This is difficult because it’s a lot easier to throw a lot of stuff into the work you’re doing than to try to simplify and bring the work down to some essence so that it not only communicates effectively but brings the reader into what’s happening, makes them part of the story. I think that’s a positive and a good thing in film, in books, in writing. Some of the best writers I think are those who are astute enough to select the proper words without anything extraneous. TW: Your work, while it looks simple, is very bold and you can see the lineage between your work on Tor and somebody like Foster and some of the newspaper strips. You can see a direct connection between you and their sensibilities… JK: I appreciate that.
TW: I’m going to change the subject now. So you’re doing something for this Wednesday Comics series for DC? Adam [Kubert] is writing a Sgt Rock story that you’re drawing? JK: That’s a very pleasurable deed for me because my son Adam wrote the script and I’m illustrating it and it’s 10 whole pages. I haven’t quite started it yet. But that’s next on the agenda. TW: Did it feel strange, almost like the roles were a little bit reversed? JK: Yes and I’m enjoying it very much. Every opportunity that I get to work with my son whose work I admire and respect I really enjoy. TRIPWIRE 109
TW: So you’ve also got another original graphic novel coming out. Who is publishing that? JK: It’s a war graphic novel and the publisher is DC. It’s a story about the Vietnamese War, a story that occurred in 1965. I was fortunate enough to meet some of the principles who were involved in a particular battle in which the American Special Forces and other American soldiers and thousands of the South Vietnamese were routed. I met the people who were involved in it. I thought it was something that I really wanted to do and it’s in the process of being finished. TW: So how many pages is that? JK: The book will probably contain anywhere between a minimum of 200 and 220 pages. The actual story that I
did is 155 pages and in addition to that, there are photographs. It’s all based on true events and there are very few variations from the truth. TW: So they’ll be the photos taken by the soldiers who were actually there? JK: Yes. TW: It sounds like an incredibly ambitious project. It’s incredible that you still have this passion to produce something that creators a quarter of your age would balk at the length. JK: As I said before, I’m a very fortunate person because I can pretty much pick and choose
“[Sgt Rock for Wednesday Comics] is a very pleasurable deed for me because my son Adam wrote the script and I’m illustrating it and it’s 10 whole pages. I haven’t quite started it yet. But that’s next on the agenda.” 110 TRIPWIRE
“I’m very grateful to the gods to still retain the sort of passion that pushes me to do these things. I still have the means by which I’m still asked to do a lot of work which I’m extremely grateful for and because of that situation, I’m able to be very selective of the work I’m doing.” what it is that I want to do and what I get into. I’ve got several other projects that I may decide to do later but I wanted to get on this particular book. It won’t be out in the bookstores until probably the first or second month of 2010 but it is being put together now. TW: How is it that you still have the passion? Is it just that you’re striving to improve your work or you’re constantly finding subjects that you’re still interested in that you’ve not been able to express? JK: I really don’t know what the answer is except that I’m very grateful to the gods to still retain the sort of passion that pushes me to do these things. I still have the means by which I’m still asked to do a lot of work which I’m extremely grateful for and because of that situation, I’m able to be very selective of the work that I’m doing. And I must admit I guess it is that passion. I’m driven to do it and it’s not real work. I’ve told many people that, since I was twelve or thirteen years old, I’ve never worked a day in my life. TW: Do you think that the comics
industry is still a good vehicle for people to tell stories in a way that they can’t do in any other medium? JK: Absolutely and when those books are done right, when there is a good marriage between art and story, there’s nothing like holding these things in one’s hands, being able to turn the pages back and forth. I’m fully aware of the advantages of the computer and being able to pull information up at will and all of those things. But I don’t think that that’s a substitute for actually holding something in your hand.
page Conan insert. I just sent it in last week as a matter of fact. It still has to be coloured. In addition to that Tim Truman who is the writer of the Conan series is doing the rest of the book so I’ve done seven pages, Tim is doing fifteen pages and Tim is a graduate of my school, which was the biggest kick. TW
TW: Do you think the continued interest in Tarzan and Tor is that people still enjoy that sense of wonder that they get from being able to visit places that existed millions of years ago or never existed? JK: I hope that’s the reason people are interested and want to see the things that I’m doing. I don’t hide the fact that Tor is just a caveman Tarzan. I just finished a seven page insert that will be part of a Conan book that I’m not sure when it’s coming out. I was asked by the editor, Phil Simon, to do it. I did a seven TRIPWIRE 111
BIBLICAL
“I was paid for the Superbaby story which they commissioned, and since it was a work made for hire, I have no legal claim to the work once I’ve been paid.”
PROPORTIONS
prevent it from being published. It was actually comic book fans that felt I was treated unfairly by DC and demanded to see the story. Fans published it on the internet. Frank Miller and other fans nominated it for an Eisner award, which it won. I think “Superman’s Babysitter” is a nifty cartoon, and I’m glad it was finally published, and I’m very happy with the way everything turned out. By concentrating on my own creations, such as King David and I Die At Midnight (which was published after Superman’s Babysitter), I avoid the risks involved when doing a work for hire version of DC characters. When I do a DC character, all I’m really interested in is the money. Whatever they do with it after they buy it is up to them.
pic: Luigi Novi courtesy of Wikipedia
Back in TRIPWIRE Volume 4#11, published in Mar/ April 2002 and in May-June 2002, we spoke to Kyle Baker about his graphic novel King David so here’s his interview in full
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KYLE BAKER has built up a reputation as an artist specialising in graphic novels. As his latest book, KING DAVID, hits the shelves, TRIPWIRE caught up with him to find out more about the book, his work (present and future)… TRIPWIRE: There was quite a controversy a few years ago about the Superman’s Babysitter story in the DC Elseworlds oneshot. Obviously the story was reprinted in last year’s Bizarro Comics hardcover. Would you have come back to do King David if an agreement hadn’t been reached over that short story? KYLE BAKER: There wasn’t any disagreement between me and DC. A large percentage of the work I do never sees daylight. I’ve done work for movies, advertising, and magazines and it is common for work to be commissioned, paid for and not used. As long as I’m paid for the work I’ve done, I don’t really care whether it is published or not. I was paid for the Superbaby story which they commissioned, and since it was a work made for hire,
I have no legal claim to the work once I’ve been paid. I also think that DC has the right to determine how their characters are portrayed in their own books. If someone besides me were to write a Cowboy Wally story, I would make sure that they produced a version of my character that I approved of. If I found the story offensive in any way, I would
TW: Your style has been getting more and more cartoony and the influence of classic MAD artist Jack Davis can be seen more prominently in your illustrations and composition. Is this something that’s always been there in your work but you’ve just chosen to bring it out more in recent years? KB: I love MAD. I’m one of the “Usual Gang Of Idiots”. As far as being cartoony, I’m a cartoonist. I’m practicing every day to become a better cartoonist.
“I’ve also done graphic novel adaptations of Through The Looking Glass and Cyrano De Bergerac for First/ Berkely’s Classics Illustrated line.” TRIPWIRE 113
“I researched that historical period, the cultural context, the land, geography, and the people. In order to understand the Bible, it’s necessary to understand the culture that produced it. the idea that all human life is equal and valuable is relatively new. In King David’s time, such things as slavery, infanticide and selling one’s children were culturally acceptable.” To this end, I emulate the work of the best cartoonists, including Davis, Aragoñes, Eisner, Drucker, Elder, Kurtzman, Wood, Schulz, Ketcham, Hart, Foster, Caniff, Kirby, Capp, Kelly, Gibbons, Miller, Spiegelman, Feiffer, Bellamy, Gould and all the rest. TW: You’ve also been playing with computer colour a lot. Have you reached a stage with it where you’re happy that it’s as versatile and you’re as adept with it as you were/ are with hand painted work? KB: I like the predictability of
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computer colouring. When I do a painting for publication, I’m never sure how it will look once it’s been photographed, scanned, reduced, separated, and printed. A computer bypasses all the intermediate stages, producing separated colour. If the computer tells me the colour is 50% Magenta, then that’s what will be published. TW: Of the original graphic novels you’ve produced (Cowboy Wally Show, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here and I Die At Midnight), King David is the first adaptation you’ve produced. Is it a story that you’ve felt an affinity for for some time or did you hit upon it almost by accident? KB: I’ve always loved the story since I was a child, and wanted to wait until I was technically able to pull it off convincingly. You gotta be a pretty good cartoonist to pull off a Bible epic. I’ve also done graphic novel adaptations of Through The Looking Glass and Cyrano De Bergerac for First/Berkely’s Classics Illustrated line. Cyrano… was scripted by Peter David.
TW: As well as Jack Davis, animation seems to be more of an influence on your current work than it was before. Do you follow a lot of modern animators, people like Tartakovsky, and do you find a lot of contemporary animators that get you fired up? KB: I’m an animator. I do all the animation on KyleBaker. com, and have done designs and storyboards for Disney, Dreamworks, Imagine, Fox and Warner Brothers. In my spare time I’ve been writing and designing a “Noah’s Ark” feature.
Most corporate animation is done primarily for an audience of children, so I can’t really say I’m too impressed by any of it. I do cartoons for adults. I enjoy Pixar movies with my kids. I like old MGM Tom ‘n’ Jerrys. And Bugs Bunny used to be funny. Yellow Submarine is pretty cool. TW: 160 pages is a big undertaking but you’ve become known for the longer, more ambitious projects. What is it that appeals to you about such work? KB: If I land a contract for a 160 page book, I don’t have to look for another job for six months. Most freelance art jobs only last a few days, then you’re back on the street trying to hustle up another. Also, longer books appeal to the mainstream bookstore market; Places like Virgin Megastore, Borders and Barnes&Noble all stock graphic novels these days. TW: Apart from studying the source (ie the Old Testament), what other research did you have to carry out before you
“I’ve always loved [King David] since I was a child, and wanted to wait until I was technically able to pull it off convincingly. You gotta be a pretty good cartoonist to pull off a Bible epic.” could begin King David? Did you find the research side more arduous than for your other more lowkey work? KB: I researched that historical period, the cultural context, the land, geography, and the people. In order to understand the Bible, it’s necessary to understand the culture that produced it. For example, the idea that all human life is equal and valuable is relatively new. In King David’s time, such things as slavery, infanticide and selling one’s children were culturally acceptable, while adultery was punishable by death, as it still is in parts of the Middle East. I enjoyed doing the research. When I embark upon a book it is necessary that I choose a subject that will hold my interest for the months it will take to execute. You Are Here was written as an excuse to spend weeks sketching
in Central Park and observing sunsets on the Hudson River. King David was an excuse to spend a year researching the Bible. I always try to get paid to do what I like. TW
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stripwire Tripwire’s acclaimed strip section JOEL MEADOWS p117-124, 135-137
Joel Meadows is a journalist and writer with over three decades of experience on newspapers, magazines and books. His CV includes some of the world’s most renowned publications including Time Magazine, The Times, The Sunday Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Guinness World Records and The Observer. He has also written extensively about comics, film, TV and culture for publications like Playboy, Time Magazine, Esquire, Variety, Empire, Big Issue In The North, Jewish Chronicle. He is also the editor-in-chief of Tripwire. He lives in London.
ANDY BENNETT p117-124
Andy Bennett was born in southern Ohio. He is a graduate of Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, and The Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus. Today he serves as a digital media designer at Highlights for Children in Columbus, as well as offering freelance design and illustration work for a wide range of clients. He currently lives in Columbus with his wife Lisa. http://www.b3nn3tt.com/
ROGER LANGRIDGE p125
Roger Langridge is a New Zealand-born comics writer and artist who came to prominence with his work on Judge Dredd Megazine, The Straightjacket Fits with writer David Bishop. His creator-owned work on Fred The Clown has won him fans around the world and has been nominated for a number of awards including an Eisner. He has also worked on The Muppets comic and Snarked for Boom! Studios and is also a working illustrator. http://hotelfred.blogspot.com/
ERAKLIS PETMEZAS p126
Eraklis Petmezas graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design and shortly after embarked on creating art for musical acts, editorial illustrations, storyboards and many pages of comics art. In his spare time he conducts comics camps promoting comics to kids. He currently lives in NC with partner Erin and cat, Newman the Nuisance. Find him on twitter: @epetmezas
SCOTT BRADEN p128-131
Having worked in the comics industry for more than a quarter century, Scott Braden has written articles about the four-color medium within the pages of Overstreet’s Fan, Tripwire: The Genre Magazine, Comic Book Marketplace, the legendary Comics Buyers Guide, among others. His first comic book writing appeared in 1999’s Galactica: The New Millennium for Realm Press – which was illustrated by Kent Menace co-creator Mike Malbrough. Besides focusing on chronicling the further adventures of Kent Menace, he also freelances for Gemstone Publishing, Tripwire and The Associated Press.
JUAN CASTRO p128-131, 135-137
From inking the work of Michael Shipley, Jeff Dillon, and Marty Grosser, to teaming with the incredibly talented Lidia Corinne in bringing the forthcoming ‘Message In A Bottle’ preview tale (found exclusively in the print mag you are reading) to life, Juan Castro is an artist, inker and colorist. He does it all.
LIDIA CORINNE p128-131
Lidia Corinne is an art school teacher, part-time model, tattoo artist, and comic book artist. She and studio mate Juan Castro put the finishing touches on Jeff Dillon’s layouts for the Kent Menace tale, ‘Message In A Bottle,’ which can found here.
JEFF DILLON p128-131
Designer, artist and writer, Dillon contributed to the art chores for the 4-page ‘Message In A Bottle’ story featured here, and wrote the prose story ‘Cowboys Of The Pangean’ for next year’s Kent Menace collection, Treasure And Treacle.
MEGGAN ROBINSON p132-134 Meggan Robinson is an experienced writer and journalist who has written two Kent Menace shorts including the one in this magazine.
DILLON SAMUELSON p132-134 Dillon Samuelson is an American painter who has produced pieces for all three Kent Menace publications.
JOHN CHARLES p138-145
Charles is a professional comic book artist, writer, and colourist. He’s drawn/digitally painted covers and illustrated for 2000AD, provided cover art for IDW in the U.S., and coloured Spectacular Spider-Man and a variety of other strips for Panini UK’s Marvel Heroes comic. Most recently, he’s been a regular colourist on Sinister Dexter and Judge Dredd for 2000AD. He is also the co-creator of TechnoFreak from Sunday Lunch Comics. www.sundaylunchcomics.com
TOM NEWELL p138-145
Tom Newell hails from Birmingham, in the UK. When he’s not drawing comics he’s reading them. After too many years of labouring jobs Newell decided to follow his dream and become a professional comic artist.
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Prestel books are available wherever books are sold www.prestel.com TRIPWIRE 147