An Interview with Graham Nolan of Compass Comics

From my perspective, Graham Nolan, born in Jersey, raised on Long Island and the Space Coast, and trained in Dover, I could tell the artist has a very tidy office. I could plainly see that as I interviewed him twice in one week this past winter, a conversation conducted via a Zoom-like “videotelephony” software program.

Maybe he cleaned it up for the chat but, after spending three or so hours learning about him, I’m inclined to believe he’s a remarkably organized person.

Graham’s career also indicates a pragmatic and methodical creator, one with a keen eye on advancement and heart yearning to take on a challenge. And you’ll learn that for

Comic Book Creator: You live near Buffalo. What happened with the big storm?

Graham Nolan: Well, I live in Buffalo because my wife is from this area, and we settled here rather than in “my” Florida, but I’ve been trying to get back there ever since. [laughs] As far as the storm goes, it was bad, it was heavy, but we didn’t get it where I’m at as bad as the city did. I’m about 20 minutes south and east of Buffalo, and that’s the snow belt, so typically we get more snow than they do, but this time it hit the city a lot worse than us, and that’s why 40 someodd people ended up dying.

CBC: One of the most interesting little facts I just learned was you very specifically wanted to work on Detective Comics, but not only because it was Batman, but it was because your dad was a detective.

Graham: Yeah, my dad was a homicide detective on Long Island. My whole family was in law enforcement, and Detective Comics was the first Batman comic I ever bought, it was the masthead of DC Comics, that’s where “DC” comes from — “Detective Comics.” At one point, Chuck [Dixon] and I were offered yourself reading this transcript, as you discover the man completed three years of studies in two while at the Kubert School, steadily advanced at DC Comics to become an important Batman artist, produced for numerous years daily and Sunday newspaper strips, and now completely navigates his own future by creating exciting and fun comics for his own company, Compass Comics, by appealing directly to his audience, one that crowdfunds his output, which includes Joe Frankenstein.

My first question refers to a savage winter storm the city of Buffalo suffered in December, when nearly 50 people died. Graham lives only 20 miles east of New York’s second largest city. — Jon

B.

Cooke

Batman, which always sells better than Detective, but both of us wanted to stay on Detective just because of its history.

CBC: You were born on Long Island?

Graham: Technically, I was born in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. My dad at that time was working for U.S. Steel, and we were right across the Hudson. It sits right on the bluff, but I was only there for a few months before we went back to Long Island, where he was from Long Beach.

CBC: I was talking to Greg Goldstein…

Graham: Oh, yeah!

CBC: And he, out of the blue, mentioned a bar that you’re somehow connected with…?

Graham: Nolan’s Pub! It’s still there. Yeah, my dad opened up the pub and then decided to go into the police department and had to sell the pub because of a conflict of interest. So, I think around 1964, he sold it and the new owners kept the name, and it’s been that name ever since, Nolan’s Pub. It’s a typical “lifeguard and cop bar” on the east side of Long Beach…

CBC: “Lifeguard and cop bar”? [chuckles] Are there a lot of “lifeguard and cop” bars?

Graham: Well, in Long Beach, there is, because, you know, it’s a barrier island. When he was a young man, he was a captain of the lifeguards, too, so there was a lot of connections, a lot of cops and firemen were lifeguards, and so there’s a lot of that cross-over.

CBC: Right. You said he worked in U.S. Steel? What was he doing there?

Graham: He was in sales for U.S. Steel for a very short period of time. After he and my mom were married, he had gotten out of college and somehow got involved in sales for U.S. Steel, but it wasn’t working out for him, and I don’t think my mom cared for the lifestyle. So they went back to Long Beach, he opened Nolan’s Pub, and then decided, well, he’s going to get into the police department. His father, my grandfather, was a former chief of police there, so it wasn’t too hard to get into the police academy, and then he went from his tin shield to his gold shield, and then he retired from an injury, and then we moved to Florida.

CBC: What year did he retire?

Graham: Well, he was on medical leave for a few years, so we moved to Florida in 1974, so he retired probably in ’74

CBC: That must have been a big change going to Florida.

Graham: It really was. It was a culture change, because the Florida of 1974 was not the Florida of 2022. There was a lot more podunk there, particularly where we were… I shouldn’t say that, I should say my mom and dad were very bright, educated people, so when we decided to move to Florida, first thing, they looked into was the schools and culture, and stuff like that. So they settled on the Space Coast because of the Air Force base there and its connection to the Kennedy Space Center. So there were a lot of engineers and scientists living on the Space Coast, and so they would demand better schools and on.

CBC: Is that the east coast?

Graham: Right, it’s about halfway down the east coast. Where I lived was just south of Cape Canaveral. It’s Cape Canaveral, Titusville, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach, and Indian Harbour Beach, where I grew up.

CBC: Did you witness the launching of the U.S. Space Shuttle?

Graham: Oh, yeah! Yup, I saw STS 1 go up and I saw it on the launchpad, too.

CBC: Wow! That must have been impressive.

Graham: It was, and when they brought it out from Edwards Air Force Base, we were cleaning our pool in the back yard, and we heard this noise and the 747 flew over our house with the shuttle on top of it, piggyback! It came further south of Canaveral and banked around to land at the Canaveral Air Force Base.

Conducted by Jon B.

CBC: Were you disappointed that the Apollo program was over by the time you moved there?

Graham: Yeah, I was. They’d been talking about the space transport system for a while, but it was constantly being pushed back and, finally in 1981, I think it was ’81 when they finally launched the first one, but they were talking about it in ’77, so it was a long wait. But, prior to that, I saw lots of stuff go up, like satellite launches, either Apollo-Soyuz or the International Space Station launch, you know, the first part of that. We could see the launches from our backyard or go down to the beach, which is like four blocks away, and watch it there.

CBC: Wow!

Graham: That’s why I’m a space junkie. Growing up there, I always like science fiction and all that, but then when we moved down there and I grew up on the Space Coast, and I knew a lot of my friends’ dads that worked for [Harris Corp] or at Rockwell International and all these other subcontractors on the base. You just get caught up in the culture and stuff. And it was really cool.

CBC: Very nice. Did you have siblings?

Graham: Yeah, I have a brother and a sister, both younger. I’m the oldest.

CBC: You’re born in 1962, so you must have been really young when the Adam West Batman show came on.

Graham: Yes. I was four.

CBC: Did you watch it first run?

Graham: I did watch it first run, though I don’t know if I watched first season or if I caught it in the second or third season, but… yeah, definitely. I call it first run stuff. When Topps had the Batman cards, I remember getting those. I had the Corgi Batmobile and the Batboat. I had a birthday party. I’ll see if I can find that photograph and throw it into the file for you, so you can use it… It was a Batman birthday party and I had bats on the cake and a bat phone, and all that.

CBC: Were you indulged as a child?

Graham: No, not at all, but that stuff was cheap…

CBC: Your mom was a schoolteacher?

Graham: Right. Elementary school. She taught in Bethpage, on Long Island.

CBC: I read an article from a Florida newspaper, about when you’re on vacation down there and she talked you into coming in and giving a talk to a bunch of kids.

Transcribed by Tom Pairan

Above: Talent Showcase #16 [Apr. 1985],

Graham: Right, and she became a teacher after years of not teaching, just being a homemaker. They paid them so poorly down there, and she had a lot of years in between, and she had to take remedial courses and all that stuff, and she ended up getting her teaching degree down there and teaching at Ocean Breeze Elementary School. And, in the first year, she became a “Teacher of the Year.”

CBC: Wow. Was it a happy childhood?

Graham: Happy-ish. My brother and I, we made things happen, and my mom made sure we were happy, but there was troubles in the marriage. My dad was drinking. A lot of cops, Irish cops, have developed drinking problems and we were no different, and so it made for sometimes a hostile environment, which kind of pushed us towards comics as a release. It was monsters and magazines, and stuff like that… a fantasy world to escape to.

CBC: Was it abusive against you or was it just a hostile environment?

Graham: Just a hostile environment, when the parents are constantly fighting, that trickles down to the kids, the yelling, the arguing, it’s a toxic environment as opposed to a really hostile scene…

CBC: Did they get divorced?

Graham: Eventually, yeah. I was 18 when they finally divorced and, quite honestly, probably should have been sooner, I would have probably worked out better.

CBC: When did drawing come into play for you?

Graham: I don’t know the beginnings of the actual drawing, but I do know when comics came into the play of drawing, and that was in 1974, when my sixth-grade teacher brought in comic books for the class to read during recess. My brother and I both had some comics, but we don’t remember where we got them — if they were handed down by friends or bought by parents, just to “shut us up” type of thing, but when the teacher brought that stuff in, that was a whole new world. They were brand-new, right off the stands, and they were exciting! They had these characters, which I knew from other media, like Batman, Superman, Aquaman… It was a Justice League of America comic in particular that did it for me, and that’s when I got hooked, and then we started going to the local luncheonette, where there was a spinner rack, and they sold the comics and we started buying our own. And we were off to the races!

CBC: You said it was 1974? So it was right when you moved to Florida or before?

Graham: Yeah, this was like around March of ’74, maybe even into ’73 ,when he brought the comics in. But the first comics that I looked at had a cover date of July of ’74, which means they were sold in March, so when I backdate like that, it looks like February/March is when we first started buying them.

CBC: So did you have any familiarity with Florida when you moved there or was it a whole new world?

Graham: It was a whole new world. The only thing that was familiar was the beach, because I lived three blocks from the ocean in Long Beach, Long Island, which, again, is a barrier island, and when we moved down there and moved to Indian Harbour Beach, also a barrier island, and we were maybe an extra block or two from the beach then, so the beach culture resonated with me, but the other culture did not.

CBC: What, the “cracker” culture?

Graham: Yeah, pretty much, yes. The racism, which I hadn’t seen at that point, there was some things that people were unafraid of saying that hit us…

CBC: The “word”?

Graham: Yeah, the “word” got used just like any other adjective. In Long Island, we were in Nassau County, very liberal, and it still is.

CBC: So, with the anxiety of living in a new place, since you just discovered comics, wee they something to embrace when you were down there?

Graham: Oh, absolutely. It was a saving grace for us was finding the new place to get our comics to take us to these fantasy worlds, away from the noise and the nonsense. We went into it hard.

CBC: Where did you buy your comics?

Graham: At the 7-11s down there.

CBC: You keep saying “we”; is this your brother and you?

Graham: Right, my brother was with me and we were into comics together for a while, and then he got out of them eventually, went down his own path, but I stayed.

CBC: What’s his name?

Graham: Chris, Christopher Nolan. [laughs] But not the one you usually think of with that name.

CBC: Was Chris creative?

Graham: He liked to draw, but he really didn’t have a proficiency at it, but he is creative, much more musical than I. He eventually learned to play guitar and sing and played in bands and stuff, and still does.

CBC: When did you recognize artistic styles and who did you embrace most of all, early on?

Graham: That’s easy: it was John Romita, Sr. His work was very recognizable to me, because he was doing covers for Amazing Spider-Man and, at that time, he was art director at Marvel, so he was doing a lot of covers, particularly inking over Gil Kane, who tended to be the mainstay cover artist for Marvel, like Nick Cardy was over at DC, and I love the slickness of his work, I loved how he drew the heroic characters and the pretty women and stuff like that. So yeah, definitely Romita was one of the first guys whose work I recognize. Kirby, of course, is unmistakable and… well, I wrote that thing for you for Kirby’s 100th birthday [Kirby100], about his horror stuff was the first stuff that I ever saw from Fear #2 [Jan. 1971], and so Kirby’s power and the stuff I saw to first and early on.

CBC: Were you buying back issues?

Graham: There was no place to find back issues back then, not where I was in Long Beach, when we got to Florida, we found some places that had back issues, and we started buying stuff.

CBC: Is that the way you got Monsters on the Prowl and Where Creatures Roam, and that stuff?

Graham: Like the Fear comic. That’s one of those ones that I had where I don’t know where I got it from, but I do have it. So I got that off the stands when it came out in ’71, so that was right on that cusp of when I was starting to discover comics too, when I think about it.

CBC: You said you were into the monster movies too, right?

Graham: Monster movies came first.

CBC: Can you tell me what was it about the appeal of Jack’s monsters?

Graham: With Kirby, it’s all about power. And the way he drew these creatures were scary-looking, the proportions on them, they were big and heavy, and I don’t mean just like the kaiju-style, the ones taller than a building, even the ones that were human-sized, they had a lot of energy and a lot of power. And they look like juggernauts that you couldn’t stop. And the way he portrayed the protagonist also kind of enhanced that, that they always look like they knew they couldn’t beat this thing…

CBC: Did you copy them?

Graham: I’m sure I did. I would just open up and start drawing Batman by Dick Sprang, or Superman by Curt Swan, or John Romita’s Captain America. Because that was another comic that I had, Captain America #114 [June 1969]. So it was right after Kirby and the Steranko run, and then Buscema took over for #115 [July ’69], I think the Colan came in… Romita did that one issue, #114, and Sharon is going on a suicide mission because she thinks Steve is dead, that Hydra had killed him, and so she’s gonna go on the suicide mission for Fury, and they released the Walking Stiletto against her, the “robot that can’t be stopped,” and she’s about to go down… Cap’s shield comes flying in and smashes into the face of this robot, and then there’s this close up shot of a her going, “It can’t be… It can’t be!” But it is! Captain America! And then there’s a splash shot of Cap and Bucky running towards the reader, and Cap is leaning over and he’s catching the shield, as it is slung back to him, and he catches the shield backhand, and Rick Jones/Bucky is in the background, running towards the reader… I tried to draw that thing a million times, there’s such great foreshortening of Romita’s drawing of Cap’s leg coming forward, the twist in the body, the catching the backhand, catching the shield. I never got it right… I never could get it right.

CBC: Johnny’s not easy to imitate.

Graham: He’s so good.

CBC: JR Senior, he loved Jack’s stuff (and so does Junior!). And he wasn’t doing that much at the time because he was so busy as art director, but he did do the daily Spider-Man strip. Did you…

Graham: Our paper started that from the first one… Actually, my brother and I cut them out of the newspaper, and I still have them in a folder.

CBC: So do I! I pasted mine all up in a scrapbook.

Graham: Our newspaper colored them and it looks like shit. It was a two-color process… The Sundays, of course, were colored by the syndicate and those look great, but the dailies in color, not so much. I wish I had them in black-&-white.

CBC: But Johnny was really rockin’.

Graham: Oh yeah. That era is gorgeous art-wise, Romita but the stories of that time are just hard. Their polemics on race… and Sam Wilson becomes this really unlikable character, and Cap is not Captain America, it’s like he’s not even a super-soldier; it’s just like a good athlete type of thing. Sometimes they go off model like that, particularly in that era, and that stuff used to drive me nuts, even as a kid.

CBC: How did you recognize the quintessential Captain America?

Graham: Because of #114. That was 1969. That was, like I said, it was Stan and Steranko, and before that Stan and Kirby. Yes, he was the man-out-oftime type of thing, but he was clearly this great, great character who wasn’t always so conflicted, and then by the known, I probably would have gone into other profession!

Above: Graham’s first pro art appeared in New Talent Showcase #14 [Feb. 1985]. Inset left: NTS editor Sal Amendola reveals that Graham’s three-page story (below) was the result of a debate the young artist had with Kubert School classmates.

Above: Promotional poster of the Dynamic Duo, penciled by Graham, inks by Ray McCarthy, circa 1996.

Below: While we predict more creative greatness from Graham in future years, the artist will most likely always be best-known for co-creating (with writer Chuck Dixon) Bane, the Batman villain who broke the Caped Crusader’s back in the 1990s “Knightfall” storyline. The character was, in part, inspired by fabled pulp hero Doc Savage, the “Man of Bronze,” whose adventures Graham loved reading as a teen. This is Graham’s style guide for an action figure.

[laughter] But it was a passion, a love that I had from that age onward and continues to this day.

CBC: Personally, it’s a big decision to become an artist. I remember coming to the crossroad. I wanted to be a cartoonist as a kid, but I recognized quickly it’s a solitary life and, frankly, for me, it was to hang with girls or spend my teen years solitary drawing, staying up all night. Drawing and drawing, and drawing and drawing… It can be lonely, and girls, well, not so lonely. Did you just have a certain fortitude and able to divide the time, so you didn’t see it as a solitary thing necessarily?

Graham: No, I liked the solitude because it took me out of some of the drama that was going on in the household, so I could focus in on that, and it was a creative outlet as well. There are plenty of times where like my buddies and I would go out to the clubs or something like that and, if it was a dull night, I leave, come home and do some drawing while they’d still be there striking out. [laughter] “I’m wasting my time. There’s nothing here. I’m gonna go home and try and work on my career. Good luck, boys!”

CBC: Were you a personable guy, were you able to talk to girls? You had a sister, right?

Graham: I was a shy kid, unsure of myself in my place in the world, that kind of stuff. So I tended to have a lot of girls who were friends. I was “That Guy.” They loved me because they could talk to me and all that stuff, but I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends.

CBC: Did you perceive it as kind of a nerdy thing? When you were getting into comics, were you comfortable…

Graham: At that time, it certainly was nerdy. There was a stigma about it. If you were into comics, you were a nerd, like, “Ohh, Star Trek conventions, the goofy people with the ears and all that kind of stuff!” That’s how it was perceived. Today, it’s the in-thing and cool thing to be in nerd culture. Yeah, it was embarrassing at times, but I had a goal, a plan, and a dream, and so there was the fandom aspect of it that I enjoyed, but there was also the business end of it that I was trying to embrace and become a part of. So I could balance that nerd exclusion from the fact that, you know what? I’m going to have a good career at some point.”

CBC: To what do you attribute that fortitude, that self-assurance?

Graham: Tenaciousness. It’s part of my nature.

CBC: Where do you think you picked that up in your life? Was it your father or your mother…?

Graham: I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know. Scrappy Irish, I guess.

CBC: You come from a family of police officers, right? Was that ever an option for you or going into the military? We weren’t at war by the time…

Graham: My dad discouraged me from going into the police department. When we moved in ’74, New York was a morass of crime and drugs. So he did not want that for me. He wanted me to do something else, but he was not happy when I made the announcement that I wanted to draw comics. Now, my mom, who was a teacher and artistic, she was supportive. “Okay, alright, he’s young. Let’s see where this goes.” But my dad, he couldn’t get it. He says, “You’ve got two cousins who graduated from Pratt Institute in New York, and one was flipping pizzas and the other one was laying brick. If you don’t wanna go to college, why don’t you take up a trade?” That was his worldview. You take up a trade or get into working for somebody like the police department, fire department, whatever. The idea of going into an artistic business or even one of entrepreneurship, I think seemed foreign to him. But I’m tenacious and, if I have a goal, I won’t let anybody stand in my way to do what I want to do. And, if it fails, that’s fine. I fail on my own terms, but I won’t not do something just because somebody else doesn’t think it’s right.

CBC: So that must have been really frustrating, not getting your way, so to speak, when you couldn’t afford to go back to the Kubert School after that first year.

Graham: It was devastating, because everybody I was in school with, was now going to be a year ahead of me, if I got to go back, so they were going to be progressing and I was stagnant. The other thing, too, was my brother was leaving for college, so I was stuck at the house at the height of the problems and of the divorce. So, it was a really tough year and, when I was able to go back, the guys I was in class with were now third-year students, and I’m a second-year. But I did get to meet some great guys and start some great friendships. The first-year guys I went to school with were Adam and Andy Kubert, Ron Wagner, and Lee Weeks. My second year, I was with Bart Sears, Mark Pennington, and they’re all friends still, so it was a good crop of students, as well, that came in those couple of years.

CBC: And during the off-year, what were you doing?

Graham: I was working, saving money, and taking art courses at a local community college.

CBC: What were you doing for a job?

Graham: At that time, I was working construction, doing labor work in the hot summers of Florida, digging ditches, laying pipes, building docks, and stuff like that.

CBC: It was the pay good?

Graham: Well, again, it’s a learning experience. Certainly, when you go to a school like that, you’re assessing everybody. How do you stack up against everybody else that’s there? And I stacked up good with those who were there, so I knew I was going to do pretty well at the school, and then there’s people you looked at, you’re like, “They’re not going to make it.” Every once in a while, some guy will really improve and they’d be, “Holy sh*t, he really progressed in a year!” But, by and large, you pretty much get that assessment down and it usually holds true.

My thing has always been storytelling and my weakness was the actual draftsmanship, which was okay, but it wasn’t great. So that took a lot of years before it really got locked down, but my storytelling was always there, it was honed better, but that was something that came much more naturally to me.

CBC: Is there any way for us uninitiated to be told what it is about comic book storytelling, which makes it intuitive? Is there a formula for it? What is it?

Graham: Well, it’s complicated. There’s no one way to describe it. What’s the best way to tell that story? If you give a script to five different guys, even if it’s a full script — “this is panel one, blah, blah, blah, this is panel two” — what’s within those panels are going to be different; how those panels are laid out are going to be different for each one of those people.

They’re going to each tell the story through their own prism and it’ll have varying degrees of success. But, for me, I think storytelling came naturally because I like movies and, I think, when you like movies, you start to deconstruct them, and you’re in the beginning stages of learning why angles were chosen and understand why did that scene resonate. Why did that director have that camera back when he did or why did he go in close?

It’s that kind of stuff that I did naturally, even as I was learning to draw, so that when I started going to the Kubert School and learning some of the techniques that Joe would teach, that stuff was very easily translatable for me.

CBC: Where’d you get that level of concentration? Creative often suffer attention deficit disorder and you’re able to focus on storytelling at such a young age. Are you kind of an old soul?

Graham: I am definitely an old soul. When I was a kid was an old soul because I loved stuff that took place in the 1940s, I loved black-&-white movies, I loved the old comics, too, I loved old music. So definitely, I was an old soul, but some of it is not necessarily conscious; it’s subconscious as I absorb this stuff, I call it my mental library, and these books get checked into my library, and sometimes I don’t even know they’re in there, but they are… They become absorbed because I notice it, but I might not consciously notice why Hitchcock framed it that way or why that scene resonated with me, but it just does and it’s in there, and that can just be how you’re wired, it might be a natural thing for me, as opposed to a learned thing.

CBC: To grow up in a dysfunctional situation and you having your brain is wired in a certain way of being able to focus on one thing, despite chaotic stuff going on around you, there’s another response for a lot of other people, a much more self-destructive response of escape, of wanting to go out. I would say that in retrospect, I kinda went that way and it took me a time to go through my own stage of recovery with that. Do you feel like you might have dodged a bullet there that you had, that maybe comics didn’t save your life, but gave you a life in a sense that it was something that you could zero in on, that had substance, and it helped save you while all this chaos is going on around you? Was there no risk of seeking out alcohol, for instance? You come from a cop family, so to speak, and the Irish are known to drink, you know…

Graham: Yeah, we’re a hot-blooded, passionate people. And yes, I think that’s a good assessment. I think that’s true. I think it did in some ways, save me. The other aspect was my mom. My mom made sure that her kids knew they were loved, even though there was all the stuff going on in the household, she tried to get us involved and interested and supported our interests, and stuff like that, even if my dad was going off the rails, so I think a lot of it has to fall on my mom for keeping the family together, for keeping the focus not on the negative, but on the positive.

CBC: Were you estranged from your father? Did you reconcile?

Graham: Yes and yes. There was a period where we were estranged, where I had had it with his behavior and we had some blow-ups and stuff, and I said, “That’s it, we’re done.” And then, when my mom died at 60 from lung cancer, that sort of brought us together, and we ended up burying the hatchet there and re-exploring our relationship again.

CBC: You just turned 60, correct?

Graham: Yes, I’ll be 61 in March.

CBC: Except maybe for cigar smoking, you have a pretty healthy life, correct?

Graham: Oh, yeah. I exercise, I eat well. Sure, I’ve got my vices. I like my bourbon, like craft beer, and I like cigars, but I