Modern Masters Vol. 24: Guy Davis by TwoMorrows Publishing

M O D E R N

M A S T E R S

V O L U M E

T W E N T Y - F O U R :

GUY DAVIS

By Eric Nolen-Weathington

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Modern Masters Volume 24:

M O D E R N M A S T E R S V O L U M E T W E N T Y- F O U R :

GUY DAVIS edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington front cover by Guy Davis all interviews in this book were conducted and transcribed by Eric Nolen-Weathington

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Dr. Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com • e-mail: twomorrow@aol.com First Printing • February 2010 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-023-6 Trademarks & Copyrights All characters and artwork contained herein are ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis unless otherwise noted. Alice in the Land of Nod, The Marquis, Quonto of the Star Corps, Thugshots ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis. Baker Street and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis and Gary Reed. Kago No Tori and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Jamie Rich and Guy Davis. B.P.R.D., Hellboy, The Christmas Spirit, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola. Batman, Hellblazer, House of Secrets, Joker, Phantom Stranger, Sandman, and all related characters ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Fantastic Four, The Judge ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc. The Nevermen and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Dark Horse Comics. The Realm and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Gary Reed. Argent, Grendel ™ and ©2010 Matt Wagner. Zot! and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Scott McCloud. Aqua Leung and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury. The Engineer and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Brian Churilla. Robotika and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Alex Sheikman Doris Danger and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Chris Wisnia. Space Usagi and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Stan Sakai. Lucien, Métal Hurlant, The Zombies That Ate the World and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Humanoids. Solomon Kane and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Solomon Kane LLC. Dick Tracy ™ and ©2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Aliens ™ and ©2010 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Terminator ™ and ©2010 Sony Pictures. Blair Witch Project ™ and ©2010 Artisan Entertainment. Pan’s Labyrinth ™ and ©2010 Picturehouse. Aberrant, Ghouls: Fatal Addiction, Vampire: The Masquerade ™ and ©2010 White Wolf, Inc. Rom ™ and ©2010 Parker Brothers. Editorial package ©2010 Eric Nolen-Weathington and TwoMorrows Publishing.

Dedication To Donna and my little Godzilla fanatics, Iain and Caper. Acknowledgements Guy Davis, for his time and generosity and for drawing the coolest monsters on the planet. Special Thanks Stan Sakai, Rick McGee and the crew of Foundation’s Edge, Russ Garwood and the crew of Capital Comics, and John and Pam Morrow

Modern Masters Volume Twenty-Four:

GUY DAVIS Table of Contents Introduction by Stan Sakai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Part One: “It Was Always Art That I Went Back To” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Part Two: Entering a Realm of Possibilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Part Three: A Night Out at the Mystery Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Part Four: Guy Gets More Adventurous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Part Five: Frog, Zombies, and Other Assorted Pests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Part Six: Storytelling and the Creative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Art Gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

Introduction by Stan Sakai

Part 1:

“It Was Always Art That I Went Back To”

MODERN MASTERS: You were born in November of 1966 in Michigan.

MM: How young were you when he started instructing you on the basics?

GUY DAVIS: Yes.

GD: The youngest I remember was trying to learn it in junior high. I was probably taking an art class at school—very basic stuff. He was trying to teach me with oils, and I didn’t have the patience for it. “These oils never dry.” I was ready to move on to the next step, and I wasn’t interested in waiting around. I enjoyed drawing, and I played with those Prismacolor pencils as a kid, but that was the extent of any coloring I wanted to do.

MM: What did your parents do for a living? GD: My dad was a veterinarian, and my mom helped him. They had their own business, and it was kind of a family affair; all the kids worked with him for our allowances. We would clean dog cages, put labels on pill bottles—things like that.

MM: You experimented with other mediums, but you stuck mainly with a pencil and pen.

MM: So you had brothers and sisters? GD: One brother, one sister— both older. I was the baby of the family.

GD: Yeah, pretty much. I did other things as a kid. I built lots of models and scratchbuilt spaceships and weird things out of household objects and hung them up. For a while when I was younger I thought, “That’s what I want to do when I get older,” but it was one of those things that didn’t carry on. I did Super-8 stopanimation movies when I was young, too. Again, “That’s what I want to do.” But it was always art that I went back to.

MM: Being the youngest, were you doted on? GD: Oh, I’m sure I was. [laughter] I got into the usual sibling fights, but it was nothing bad at all. But I’m sure I was the spoiled brat of the family. It’s hard to be objective, because I like to think I’m an angel. [laughter] MM: Your father painted and sculpted as a hobby. Is that how you became interested in art, through watching him?

MM: Were you using clay models for your stop-animation?

GD: Probably, or just through being encouraged. He did it as a hobby—oil painting and things like that—so when they saw me scribbling they would supply me with old papers from the clinic and typewriter paper, and I would keep drawing and scribbling. They saved everything, as parents do. They were always very encouraging. I remember my father tried to teach me how to paint, as far as the tools and what colors to lay down, but I could never wrap my head around that.

GD: Yeah. I forget what I had seen on TV—I’m sure it was a Harryhausen film. MM: The Sinbad movies were shown on TV fairly regularly during the ’70s. GD: Oh, yeah. This was before cable, but in Michigan we get lots of Canadian channels, which show a lot of 6

British and French stuff. There was a show called Vision On which was made for deaf children, so there was no dialogue. They would show this group of people doing things, like drawing, painting or making something—it was more elaborate than that, but all just by showing them doing it. They always had skits and stop-animation with clay at some point in the show, and I think that stuck in my mind. “I’m not going to be able to do fighting skeletons like Harryhausen, but I can mold some clay and move it around one bit at a time.” That’s when I got the old Super-8 camera. There was no plot to these things at all. It would just be a clay monster moving from left to right, but when you’re a kid it’s like, “It’s alive! I made this thing move!” It was just for fun. I’m sure I learned more as I went along, and I looked into working with armature with ball-pean joints, but that was too advanced, and then I lost interest in it and went back to sketching. MM: I imagine with your dad’s interest in art there were probably a lot of art books around the house. Did you have any interest in those books as a kid? GD: I always looked at them as a kid, because they were picture books. I was very young when I started looking at those and National Geographic—which, as a kid, were interesting because they had naked

people in them. So did the art books. But I always liked looking at Bruegel and Goya and some Bosch, mainly because they had those scenes of Hell or scenes with tons of things going on. I just loved staring them and saying, “Oh, there’s someone in the background being torn apart. There’s someone over here being eaten by a bird.” It was like a seek-and-find of Hell. MM: Did you have any like-minded friends at school—kids who shared your interests? GD: I was part of the geek group—the scifi nerds. We all hung out and talked embarrassingly about movies and stuff. Some of them were artists, and later on in high school I hung out more with that crowd. But even with the art group, I was wanting to draw monsters and comics, and most of them were wanting to either draw flowers and landscapes or do technical design— things like drawing cars for advertisements. MM: You actually drew a strip for your town’s local newspaper. GD: I’m sure my father had a hand in getting it in there and promoting it. He knew the people at the paper. I had done this really awful comic strip called Quonto of the Star Corps, which is this little alien guy— because I could not draw people at all. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t wrap my 7

Previous Page: As a teenager, Guy didn’t limit himself to a school newspaper, he went straight to the big time. Guy had just recently turned 15 when this Quonto of the Star Corps was published in his hometown’s local newspaper. Left: In this earlier strip, our hero gets drafted into the Star Corps, hence the title of the strip. Quonto of the Star Corps ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

Below: Guy continued his hero’s story in the pages of Fantastic Fanzine. Next Page: The team behind Fantastic Fanzine later started Arrow Comics, and they brought Guy on board to pencil one of their first series, The Realm. This is Guy’s model sheet of three of the main characters.

head around it. So it was this little alien guy, and he had adventures in a weekly strip, which was probably inspired by the Star Wars newspaper strip. I would be surprised if anybody could follow the story I was telling each week. “What is this, and why is it part seven?” But it was fun. It was nothing related to school. I just wanted to try my hand at doing comics. MM: Did you do anything like that for school? GD: In junior high there was an assignment where you could do a comic strip, but I actually drew a full 24-page comic book— at the last minute. I was learning how to deal with deadlines, too. [laughter] And it was all wrong by any comics standard. I

took a sheet of typing paper and used the whole area. I broke it down and penciled it, inked it with a ballpoint pen, colored it with colored pencils, and lettered it by hand sloppily. It was another Quonto story, and it was a full issue. It at least put into my mind how much work goes into making a comic. It’s not just drawing a couple of things here and there. You have to fill up this page and it has to tie into the next page and the next page. MM: Most kids don’t get beyond drawing a single image. That was pretty ambitious for someone in junior high. GD: I had been doing the one drawing on a page type of thing. The first thing I started doing which made me start thinking about doing comics or comic strips was I would draw movie-monster things, where it was, “Here’s one page of Godzilla fighting, and here’s the next page of what happens next.” It was still one drawing on a page. I wasn’t really trying to tell a story; I was just bored. When nothing was on TV, I would sit down and draw adventures from my head. MM: What kind of stories were you interested in at the time? You didn’t read a lot of comics, right? GD: No, I didn’t. My father would bring home, just as a gift, some of the Spirit magazines or odd comics here and there, like the Electric Company Spider-Man [Spidey Super-Stories] or Avengers—I remember having one of those, but I couldn’t tell you what it was about. There was one that was a knock-off of the Green Hornet. The character was called The Cobra, but the title of the book was Sorcery. I remember liking that and the horror stuff. I was reading Famous Monsters magazines and things like that. I was always watching the latenight creature-features and sci-fi movies. I loved Space: 1999, and that was the first comic I remember collecting. Before that I had picked up some of the Gold Key Star Trek and Lost in Space comics, but I wanted to find every one of those Charlton Space: 1999 magazines. I still have those. MM: Did you take notice of the artists? Were there any names you latched onto?

GD: You know, I didn’t. In the magazines there would be ones that I would like a lot. “Oh, it’s this guy again.” I’m sure I looked at who it was, but it didn’t register with me at that age. Gray Morrow did a lot of the Space: 1999 stuff, and I loved his work. I never followed super-heroes, but later on when everybody would talk about John Byrne, the only thing I would know him from was that he used to do some of those Space: 1999 comics. Everybody would be like, “You don’t know anything else about John Byrne?” and I’d say, “I never read those, but he drew really good Eagle spaceships.” [laughter] MM: Did you read much as a kid, novels and such? GD: Yeah, I was always reading genre stuff, like Space: 1999 novels or Star Trek novels. I read Tolkein. I loved The Hobbit as a kid, but when I got to The Silmarillion I got kind of glassy-eyed half-way though it. I read some Edgar Rice Burroughs. I actually just started rereading the John Carter of Mars books. Bradbury, Asimov. I read Dune. It was always science fiction or fantasy. MM: With your dad being a painter and with the art books in the house, did you know much about the tools of the trade—pen nibs and things like that? GD: No, not at all, especially when it came to inking. I was inking with just a marker or pen. With painting, my dad would tell me certain brushes to try. Colored pencils are the simplest tool to use. You just pick them up and go to town. I think I was taught in school about the different lead weights. I remember a time when I did lots of pencil burnishing with different values. I was never that good at it; everything looked really soft and mushy. You’re told to blend, and you overblend. Everything was a marshmallow man when I got done with it. When I started doing comics, I didn’t want it to look soft, so I used the hardest lead I could find. It was like I was engraving the paper, and it looked too stiff. So I was learning about the tools, I just wasn’t learning the right way to use them.

GD: I wanted to do something in art. After trying stopanimation and model-making, I was thinking I’d like to do something in design or storyboarding even, but I had no clue how to go about it. I wanted to be Ralph McQuarrie [the concept designer of the Star Wars films], as every sci-fi geek probably did, but how do you go about it? I didn’t know. I just liked designing and drawing monsters and spaceships. But around that time I was also doing a lot of comics for myself and coming up with comic ideas. That seemed a little easier to approach than anything filmrelated, so instead of going to film school or something like that, I started doing fanzine work.

MM: As you got close to graduating high school, did you have a plan as to what you wanted to do? 9

Part 2:

Entering a Realm of Possibilities They said, “There’s too much Japanese animation going on in your style,” which was a big influence on my early work. It was a story I wrote and drew in the EC style. It was pretty awful, so I can’t fault them for not liking it.

MM: How did you first get involved with fanzines? Was there a local group?

GD: There would be a comics show at one of the VFW Halls every weekend, and I would go there looking for comics and old monster magazines. This was around graduation or the year after. In my senior year I was reading more comics—Judge Dredd and things like that. At one of the shows I came across the people who put out Fantastic Fanzine, which later became Arrow Comics. They had a table set up, and I looked through their fanzine. It was all self-done, but it looked fun. I started small-talking with them, and they mentioned that if I had any art to go ahead and send them some samples and they’d see what they thought. I went home and mailed some xeroxes off the next day—or maybe I brought some drawings to the next show. But they said that if I had a story idea, they would run it. It was kind of like being back at the local paper. At first I don’t know that they really wanted me so much as, “If you come up with two pages of story, that’s two pages we can fill.” But they were always really encouraging when I started doing the comics with them.

MM: What was it about the anime you saw that grabbed your attention and influenced your art? GD: The first thing that grabbed me was on a FrenchCanadian station we picked up, and that was Albator, which was the French translation of Captain Harlock. At first I though it was a French cartoon, and I was really struck by it, because it was more adult in tone—even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying—than Kimba or Speed Racer. Growing up I didn’t realize those were Japanese either, but I liked them and Gigantor and Marine Boy. But it wasn’t anything where in my head I said, “Wow, I really enjoy the look of the art.” Captain Harlock was the first of those that sparked my imagination and drew me into liking that style. And growing up as an arcade kid, Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace— the Don Bluth video games—they never really worked right, but they were fun to watch. I loved his angular style, and that seeped into my early animation style, too.

MM: How often did they publish? Did they keep a regular schedule?

MM: How long did you work in fanzines before you started getting professional work?

GD: Not really. It was maybe quarterly. I was doing four to six pages quarterly for them. I did some other stuff, too. I did a very short story for this book called Whispers and Shadows. I forget who the publisher was. They didn’t like it, but they printed it anyway. [laughter]

GD: They did six to ten issues of Fantastic Fanzine, and with the last issue they said, “Whatever you’re doing with Quonto, just wrap it up.” They wanted to branch out and start their own comic compa10

Previous Page and Left: More model sheets for The Realm: the villain of the book, Lord Darkoth; and Diggoruss the dwarf. Two guesses which one is which. Below: 1988 pin-up art for The Realm, featuring the entire main cast. The Realm and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Gary Reed.

ny. This was just before the big black-&white boom. They wanted to do a fantasy book, because they were both—Ralph Griffith and Stu Kerr—into gaming. They had somebody who had drawn the first issue of The Realm, but he backed out and didn’t want to do any more. Since I was at least producing the work, and they liked my style well enough, they said, “Let’s see what you can do with The Realm,” and they had me redraw the entire first issue. Besides the Whispers and Shadows thing, this was really my first ongoing professional job, and it happened basically because someone else didn’t want to do it. They weren’t that crazy about my style, but it didn’t kill the book. I had this weird way of drawing noses at the time, which looking back doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Everybody said, “It looks like a bent paperclip.” I’d be like, “No, you don’t understand! It’s Japanese animation!” Even by Japanese animation standards, it’s wrong. I don’t know what I was doing. It did look like a bent paperclip, but I was just pig-headed. [laughter]

Realm. I was always butting heads with the inker. He was such a pain in the ass, because he wasn’t inking it the way I wanted it to look. He was like, “This is me

MM: By that point, were you using the correct tools and paper? GD: Yes. Well, I was using too hard a lead, and I wasn’t inking it, because at that point I was of the mindset that comics were done with one person doing the penciling and one person doing the inking— “Nobody does it all themselves.” They had gotten an inker for my Quonto stuff, because I wasn’t even inking myself for the fanzine, and that just carried over to The 11

Below: You can definitely see the anime influence in this page from The Realm. Next Page: Guy took a decidedly more realistic turn in this cover for a reprint issue of The Realm published by Caliber. The Realm and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Gary Reed.

expressing my work.” “You’re making my work look like crap, though.” [laughter] I was always fighting with him. Eventually, half-way through The Realm, I ran into Sandy Schreiber, an artist who was doing fantasy conventions—I would go to fantasy conventions to show my Realm art, as well as being there as a fan—and I approached her because I liked her coloring work. At first she started coloring covers for The Realm, but after time I said, “Let’s see how you ink it, too, because I really want to get rid of my current inker.” [laughter] I talked Ralph and Stu into letting me hire her to ink it, because it was closer to what I wanted for the finished look. Looking back it sounds awful and pretentious. I look at how rough my art was, and at the time I was saying, “No, it has to look

this way!” My art was so flawed and rough, but it was the wrong inking style for it. The first inker was big into Terry Austin, and he was just adding stuff that wasn’t making it look like a Japanese cartoon, which is what I wanted it to look like. MM: You said you were going to fantasy conventions. Were you still going to comic conventions, as well? GD: Mostly science fiction/fantasy. I never went to comic conventions outside of those VFW Hall shows. During The Realm, I was still attending those. When I was promoting it more during the black-&-white glut when sales were going crazy for anything anybody did—everybody was looking for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—we started doing Chicago Comic-Con, and I would drive with them to shows in New York and other places. Before that it was just the Creation Conventions for fun though. They used to always come this way into Michigan, and looking back putting names to faces, I used to see Bob Schreck at those shows all the time. MM: Would you try to make contacts with other publishers at the conventions? Did you have any interest in trying to get in with Marvel or DC at that point? GD: At the beginning, probably not, because there was nothing there that I was wanting to do. It’s not like I was wanting to draw Spider-Man. I was happy drawing my own stories with The Realm, where I was designing the characters and drawing them the way I wanted. And I was making good money. During the glut, sales were at 40,000 for this small comic, so everything seemed fine. “It will never end.” [laughter] The following year, it was like, “Boy, was I wrong.” When everything crashed, I tried to branch out more and do some sort of workfor-hire. I did a short Speed Racer story and a couple of Ghostbusters posters for Now Comics. But I couldn’t get regular work. I would stand in those long lines at comic shows to show my portfolio. A lot of them said, “This Japanese animation stuff, nobody wants to look at that.” Back then they didn’t like it. Now it’s all over the place. They would always ask, “Why are you drawing like that?” like I had a disease

Below and Next Page: Of these pencil pages, Guy says they “were done in 2005 for a planned Arrow Comics 20th Anniversary Special, so I got to revisit the characters in my current style for a short story— but the rest of the book never got off the ground, and the idea was scrapped before I finished penciling it.” Pages 1 and 3 shown. The Realm and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Gary Reed.

or something. “What’s wrong with you that makes you draw like that?” But I liked it; it was different. Of course, Ralph and Stu were big brother, fatherly figures, because I was younger than them. They would take me and say, “Let’s stand in this line and get some critiques from people at Marvel and DC.” The Marvel and DC guys would just tear it apart. Everything was wrong: storytelling, the fact that I was drawing hair the way I was, and “Don’t even get me started on the noses! What is up with this thing in the middle of the face?” But it was good to learn to take criticism and get different people to explain to you what they thought was wrong with your work.

MM: Were you able to take anything constructive from the criticisms? Were you able to look at them objectively and use them to improve your work? GD: Anything but the noses. I stuck with that. [laughter] Yeah, I would listen to them and understand certain things. But some things were just a different preference. I remember when showing pages of The Realm to a Marvel editor, he starts flipping through it and says, “This book starts out all wrong. You have to start out like Star Wars or Indiana Jones. The first page should be a splash page with action. It grabs the readers’ eyes.” I grew up watching a lot of old movies, and I like the idea that they started off slow and built, then they’d drop off to a point and build again. I like that sense of pacing and storytelling. I could see what he was saying, because I loved Star Wars and Indiana Jones, too, but I didn’t think it should be a hard and fast rule. “Everything has to start with a bang.” But a lot of that mainstream thinking was so by the book, the whole How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, it seemed ridiculous to me. There are so many ways to tell a story, the only rule should be that it’s clear storytelling and entertaining, really. But I still listened, and I remembered and thought about those things even if I didn’t agree with them. I was never so pigheaded that I knew that what I was doing was right. I knew I was young and learning, and I was trying to get better. Except I was still pig-headed enough to not change those noses. [laughter] MM: Arrow Comics lasted about three years or so. What happened once they went into bankruptcy? GD: The black-&-white market crashed. People realized there was so much stuff out there. The Realm had enough of a following that it was able to hold on, but the money you make when the book is selling 40,000 copies isn’t the money you make when suddenly the book only sells 1,000 copies. I was living on my own off the savings I had put aside as a kid. I was doing a few odd jobs. For a while I was living just off my artwork, but after the crash I started doing other small jobs, like delivering

newspapers for a month. I was sending out sample pages to any book I wanted to draw. I would take a week and draw samples specific to the book. I was always rejected, but it was still practice. A lot of times people will come up to me at conventions and show me pin-ups for this or that, and I’ll say, “Okay, but if you want to draw Spider-Man, draw some Spider-Man pages. If you want to draw Star Wars, draw Star Wars pages. Don’t just send out a pack of various things looking for a job. Try to put the effort into showing that you want to draw it by drawing it.” MM: Did you remain confident in your abilities during that period? GD: No. It sounds like one of those humble, smug things to say, but I’m not a fan of my art. I don’t look at my art and go, “Wow, that’s great.” I look at it and I usually cringe when I see it in print. “Why did I screw that up? It was just last month. How could I have drawn Abe Sapien so badly in that panel.” I enjoy the process. I enjoy drawing. I enjoy creating it. After it’s done I send it off, and when it gets printed I’ll flip through it, but I never reread the comic. I throw the art into a drawer until someone wants it. I don’t look at it to enjoy it. It’s probably because I don’t look at it with confidence. I’m always trying to get someplace I can never reach. I’m never going to be happy with it, but I enjoy trying to get there. MM: I understand that when Arrow went out of business they gave you sole ownership of The Realm.

but it wasn’t because they didn’t get any sales, they just didn’t want to give us any of the money they made. I was just like, “Screw it. I’ve got the rights. The Realm can sit in a drawer. I don’t care. I don’t want to draw it.” I was wanting to do other stuff, and right around that time is when I met Gary Reed, who owned a couple of comic stores in the area. He was interested in The Realm, because it did have a fan base—a small one, but there were still people who liked it. He knew that if it sold at his store he could sell it as a publisher. Since it was established, he thought it would be, along with Deadworld, a good way to launch Caliber Comics. But I said I wanted to do something different. I had a couple of ideas I was shopping around, and one of them almost went to Apple Comics. Gary liked the back-up feature of that book, which was called “The

GD: Yeah. They owed us money, and they were just fed up with everything. They said, “Look, we can’t pay you”—and we’re not talking huge amounts of money here, either, but they were fed up with trying to keep the business going and were wanting to try just writing. They said, “Here’s The Realm in lieu of payment,” and I said, “Okay, I’ll take it,” and I went on my merry way. I was still friends with them; there were no hard feelings. But all of a sudden I had this property. The Realm spent a small amount of time at this awful place called WeeBee Comics, which was just a stupid name. [laughter] As you go along, you learn that if a company has a rotten name it says something about the company. They wanted to publish The Realm, and they did one issue. They immediately screwed us out of money, 15

Baker Street Irregulars.” It was eight-page retellings of Sherlock Holmes stories, but with punk characters in a slightly different world. Gary was a big Sherlock Holmes fan, so he said, “Let’s do that, but let’s not do it as retelling old Sherlock Holmes stories, because every Sherlock Holmes fan has heard these stories to death and they’re going to know the outcome no matter how differently you tell them. Let’s do something in that vein, with the alternate reality and the punks, and do a different take on the Sherlock Holmes mythos.” He wanted to co-create that with me, and since I was really big into the punk scene at the time and he was a big history buff, we worked out an alternate timeline for Baker Street, with one of the conditions being he could publish The Realm with different artists, different creators—I said, “I’ll do covers now and then”—as long as I could do Baker Street. Later on I sold him the rights to The Realm, because he had the money and I had no real interest in it by that time. MM: What was the development process going from the “Baker Street Irregulars” back-up series into the full-blown Baker Street comic? How much was you and how much was Gary?

GD: I think I had some of the characters fleshed out in the beginning and knew who the main character was. I had read all the Sherlock Holmes stories as research for “The Baker Street Irregulars.” When we started talking about characters, Gary had a lot more knowledge of Sherlock Holmes and I had more knowledge of the punk subculture that we wanted to play off of, so he would say, “Let’s call the main character Sharon Ford, because Sherlock Holmes was almost called Sherrinford Holmes.” We had different plays on names like that. I had this kid I wanted to be hanging around, so Gary said, “Let’s call him Toby, after the dog in the Sherlock Holmes books.” As far as the alternate history, that was pretty much all Gary. I wanted it to be a world where World War II never happened so we had more of a division of class. The poor are poor and treated like crap, and there are the aristocrats and all the cool, Victorian architecture. Gary built up the history around that. He even did a fake newspaper in a couple of issues, where he got to play around with what the world was like because World War II never happened. That made it more of a fantasy, which is what I wanted to do. It was never 17

Previous Page: A 1990 cover for The Realm, during its brief stay at the doomed WeeBee Comics. Above: Sharon Ford is on the case in this piece of promotional art for Baker Street. Baker Street, Sharon Ford ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis and Gary Reed. The Realm and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Gary Reed.

[laughs] but I was thinking of the entire package. I was designing the covers, the logo; I was typesetting and putting together the inside front covers and the ads for the book. MM: You were basically doing everything except inking. GD: For the first issue we brought in an inker, then Vince Locke came in and helped out with the rest of the book. I just clashed with the first inker as far as what he wanted to do and how I wanted the art to look. I should have known better after The Realm, but it was something I didn’t want to keep happening, so Gary just said, “Look, you’re going to be miserable no matter what, so just ink it yourself. Learn as you go. Your inking is good enough.” I picked up a quill and made lots of messes, lots of mistakes. I used a lot of white-out, but I just went to town with it. Vince Locke is the one who got me into using a quill over a tech pen. MM: The first issue starts with the open, cartoony style you were using, but it gradually gets looser and grittier. Was that you taking control over the inking, or was it intentional? Because with the Dr. Watson stand-in, Susan, you were transitioning from the university setting of London into the seedier underbelly of the city. GD: I need to remember that. That makes it sound like it was planned. [laughter] MM: Well, the art is very clean and open when we meet her. Then as she gets deeper into the punk subculture you start using a lot of duoshading. supposed to be a realistic, slice-of-life view of the subculture; it was more of a fairy tale of that world—an adventure story. Some of the kids I was hanging around with at the time liked it. Most of them were like, “Nothing ever happens in this thing. Where are the fights? Let’s see some gunplay.” I’d say, “It’s a mystery, you jerk.” [laughter] So in the beginning it was very 50-50. I started doing a rough script of how I was going to break down the art, and then Gary would do the finished script. As that went on, he had more editor/publisher duties and I was more interested in writing myself, so it became more of me writing it and Gary just going over it and proofreading it—especially with the second storyline, “Children of the Night.” We butted heads, but we worked well together. I think he saw how focused I was on it and how important it was to me, so he definitely gave in more. I probably made the wrong choices, too,

GD: I was just looking at different art at the time and changing my style mid-stream. I didn’t think to keep it consistent. I was looking at a lot of European artists and getting out of the Japanese animation look that I had for The Realm. It seemed a little too cartoony for what I wanted to do with Baker Street. I wanted something that was more gritty and dirty like the punk scene. I didn’t want something that was very cartoony and light like The Realm. After The Realm I was sending samples to several different places, and one of the things I wanted to draw, just because I really liked the book, was Zot! I did a complete ten-page Zot! story in pencil and sent it to Eclipse just to say, “I really enjoy the book. Do you have anything you can put me on?” I got a call from Scott McCloud, and he liked what I had done and was very flattered I had done it. He said, “I do this all myself. I’m not really looking for a fill-in artist or anything.” I said, “Oh, I was just doing it as 18

an exercise and to show Eclipse how I draw.” He liked that and said, “I have a box of books I send to different artists that you’ll probably like. You’ll get it for a month. Look through it and get from it what you can— who you like, who you don’t like—then I’ll send you an address so you can send the box to somebody else.” I said, “Okay, that’s cool.” I wasn’t sure what was going to be in this box, but I sent him my address. This huge box shows up with tons of stuff I had never seen before. It had the original phonebook volumes of Akira, some Lone Wolf and Cub, some European comics, and all this other stuff. I was just blown away by it. It was such a generous offer, too, to open up another artist’s eyes. I devoured it. Certain books, like Lone Wolf and Cub, I loved. And I loved the backgrounds and tone-work in Akira. I then started seeking that stuff out myself, along with a lot of other European artists I came across. Moebius had a lot of books out, and I got hooked on him. I forget where I first saw Jacques Tardi, but I loved his stuff. I tried to find every book I could on him and Francois Schuiten, who did this wonderful architecture. That’s the kind of look I wanted for Baker Street. All those things contributed to the direction I wanted to go. The inker we had on the first issue of Baker Street, Alan Oldham, was a good inker and a nice guy, but he was really influenced by the Pander brothers—which is not a bad thing. But I wanted something gritty, and his stuff was overly stylized. It was a clash with what I wanted. We actually had to take out a lot of his extra lines and flourishes he put on the first part of Baker Street. Then Vince Locke came in, and he inked the rest of it. I may have inked some of it, too. We both laid the tone down, and we were learning a lot as we went. MM: Do you think Vince had an influence on your own inking? I can see some of his qualities in your work, especially early on. GD: I think so. We also liked a lot of the same people. He was very into old illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll. I would show him Moebius, and he would show me the Wrightson books. I would look at them with an artist’s eye, actually looking at the linework rather than just looking at

them as cool drawings from Heavy Metal or something. I was watching what he was doing on Deadworld, which was just amazing. He had this printerly, Wrightson quality in the work. I’m sure I was picking up a lot of that. He had all these books on inking that I would look at when I would sometimes go over to his place when he would help out on Baker Street. I’m sure he influenced the direction of my linework, especially with the tools, because he was telling me what tools to use. I had no clue. I was struggling with the tech pens at the time when he told me to use quill. I hated tech pens, because they just did not move fast enough. You had to hold them this weird way, and it would skip or tear the 19

Previous Page: The game is afoot! At this early point of the series, Guy’s anime influence is still clearly showing through. Page 6 of Baker Street #1. Above: This pencil sample of Zot! that Guy sent to Eclipse resulted in something much more beneficial than a mere job. Baker Street and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis and Gary Reed. Zot! ™ and ©2010 Scott McCloud.

paper. That’s why I moved to quill, because I would rather blob and spatter than to have to move in this slow and painful manner. MM: Did you try inking with a brush? GD: I did. I wasn’t good at it. I’m trying to do more brush now. I love the look of brush, but I pick it up and my hands just shake too much. I don’t have the hand-eye coordination for the details. I can slap down the ink in bigger areas and spot blacks with brush, but anybody can sorta do that. I’ll do some fine detail now on B.P.R.D. and The Marquis with brush, but I have to have the holding line down in quill first. I can’t just draw a face or body with a brush. I can do trees and rocks and stuff that doesn’t matter, but I would never think about trying to do Liz’s face with a brush. MM: What did it do for your confidence when Baker Street got the Harvey Awards’ “Best New Series” nomination? GD: It was wonderful. That was definitely a surprise. Gary called and told me. We all thought The Crow was going to get the nomination, because it was such a hit and everybody was talking about it. When Gary called, I was expecting him to say, “The Crow’s up,” but he said, “Hey, they nominated Baker Street.” I just couldn’t believe it. With anything like that, it’s such an honor and it’s so flattering. Even now, having just won an Eisner, I never campaign for things like that, because it seems like it takes away from the sincerity of it. So when it happens, it’s a shock and a nice surprise. It definitely gave me more confidence to think that after two or three years of not getting work—and that’s why I did my own thing with Baker Street—that maybe I could make a living at it. I was making a very rough living at it before and during Baker Street. It was definitely “starving artist” time. MM: Were you able to maintain a full-time art career or were you having to work parttime jobs on the side?

GD: I had a part-time job working at Caliber. One day I showed up there to talk to Gary, and he said, “If you help me put these books together, I’ll buy you a pizza or something.” So I helped him out because he was behind on typesetting and getting some designs done. I slapped some stuff together and he liked it, so he said, “If you want to come in a couple of days a week, I’ll give you some money to help you out, because you’re not that fast with Baker Street.” I was slow. I did, what, ten issues in five years or something like that. It would take me forever to do that book, so the extra income helped. And because it was still related to comics and art, it felt better than if I had to get a “real” job. And I was still doing the punk thing, so where else could I get a job with a mohawk? And I was also doing some short stories and other art for different Caliber books along with Baker Street, but Baker Street was my main art job focus at the time. 21

Previous Page: What a difference three years makes! As Guy studied the work of artists such as Tardi and Schuiten, while mastering inking with a quill, his art for Baker Street became appropriately dense and gritty. Page 6 of Baker Street #10, the final issue (to date). Above: Promotional art for Baker Street. Baker Street and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis and Gary Reed.

Part 3:

A Night Out at the Mystery Theater that, “We could tie this in to Neil’s Sandman, and this would be a retelling of the old Sandman. Then they’d have two Sandman series.” And that’s what they went for. They saw a way of tying in to the Neil Gaiman Sandman, and they went with Sandman Mystery Theater. We went through a bunch of different names. I was sending them some logo designs for Sandman Chronicles and different things that made it sound like an old radio show. Matt thought up Sandman Mystery Theater, and that was great because it had the sound of an old-time radio show. Once that was done, Matt put me in contact with Karen Berger, and they wanted my take on the redesign of the characters. I did three giant character sheets. One was Wes and Dian, with the Sandman outfit complete with a real gas mask. One was of the Phantom of the Fair, because I thought that was going to be the first storyline since the first Sandman comic I looked at was the Roy Thomas’ Phantom of the Fair story in All-Star Squadron. I made the Phantom some obscene bondage/fetish guy. The original Phantom was just in spandex, but I looked at it and said, “You know, there’s a lot of that going on around that time period.” In between working on issues of Baker Street I had been doing fetish illos and sending them off to places looking for work, so I had a ton of reference. “Let’s make him a pervert. That’s darker than what they would normally do at DC.” [laughter] And I designed the gas gun. I sent that all to Matt and Karen, and they liked it. They bought the designs—I had to sign a work-for-hire form—and started working on the book.

MM: Why did Baker Street end with issue #10?

GD: That was the end of the second storyline. It was set up to be continued, but around that time I was contacted by Matt Wagner, who was a fan of Baker Street. It was very flattering, because I really loved Mage and Grendel. I think the first thing I did was a pin-up for him for the Grendel: Devil by the Deed collection. He wanted me to do a picture of Argent and Grendel, and I said, “Oh, sure. I’d love to.” Then he was contacted by Vertigo, which was just starting out. They were revamping a lot of DC’s stock characters. They had just had their hit with Sandman, and I think their thinking was, “Now let’s use these other characters. We need to renew the copyrights, so let’s see if we can get something new going.” Matt asked me to think of different characters and make a list of the ones I might like drawing. I went to Gary’s shop and dragged out the DC Who’s Who issues. I wanted something that was like the Green Hornet—a pulp character. I didn’t want anything with muscles, because I didn’t really like super-heroes. There’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just not a genre I ever liked. I came across a couple I liked. One was Dr. Mid-Nite, and I thought I could do something with him. Then I saw the Golden Age Sandman, and I liked that. He had this weird mask, and I could imagine, “We can get rid of the cape and put him in a trenchcoat and a real gas mask.” I put him on the list and a couple of others I can’t remember. I sent the list to Matt and said, “I’d like to do the Golden Age Sandman with a real gas mask. We probably can’t though, because of the Neil Gaiman Sandman.” But Matt’s smarter than me. [laughter] He saw 22

It seemed like it took a long time to get things going, because I was in pretty rough shape at that point trying to make ends meet. I was like, “When’s it going to start?” The numbers they were telling me I’d be getting for doing the pencils and inks, I was like, “How much do I get for doing this?” I was fine with working work-forhire, because I understood going into it that you’re getting paid to do an artist’s job the same as if I was designing Pringles packages—but it was a lot more fun. MM: You said you did the designs for the series, but you were originally only meant to be one of two or three rotating artists on the series. Did you think the money you made once every two or three months would be enough to make it on, or were you just grabbing onto anything you could? GD: My thinking at the time when they were doing the rotating of artists was that I would do my four issues of Sandman Mystery

Theater and then I would jump back on Baker Street. I was thinking, “Oh, I’ll have time, and the money I make from Sandman Mystery Theater will help keep me going on Baker Street.” I came up with a couple of other ideas I wanted to do as a one-shot comic, too. I was really feeling inspired then, because I felt I was becoming successful. It’s one thing to make a living as an artist, and it’s another thing to make a comfortable living as an artist. I started doing some design work for the next Baker Street storyline. Baker Street had a planned ending; it was never supposed to be ongoing. It’s all plotted out, so I knew what I had to do for the next part. But they knew early on that I would be coming back to Mystery Theater sooner than originally planned and that I would be drawing the book more frequently than the other rotating artists. One of the rotating artists was Vince Locke, and I ended up doing layouts with him doing the finishes for that storyline. They kept me 23

Previous Page: The opening splash page illustration for Sandman Mystery Theater #49, the plot of which revolved around a pulp magazine and their stories about the Sandman. Guy used the original look of the Sandman as a nod to the character’s history. Above: There’s just something about the gas mask that makes the Sandman an interesting character. The gas gun doesn’t hurt, either. And by putting him in a trenchcoat as opposed to a cape, Guy made Sandman a somewhat plausible hero. Sandman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

own boss. When you’re missing your deadlines, you’re just hurting yourself—well, yourself and your publisher. I could say, “I’m going to take an extra month on Baker Street.” But with Sandman Mystery Theater, they would have tossed me and got someone else. So I had to make decisions on layouts and finishes, and I had to get them done for the deadline. It wasn’t like, “Should I ink it this way? Nah, let me try it this way.” It was, “I’m inking it this way. If it’s wrong, I’ll do it better next time.” I wasn’t hacking it out. I was putting thought behind it, but I was having to make the decisions right then and there and move on. I made tons of mistakes. I cringe looking at Mystery Theater every time I see the reprints that are coming out now, but it was a very fast, harsh schedule, especially once I started doing more of them. DC Vertigo was pretty hands-off. They might say, “Well, you’re making Dian too fat. Can you make her less fat?” They didn’t say anything about how everybody had potato heads. [laughter] They were like Mole People the way that I was drawing them. [laughter] “You’re not the best at drawing attractive women.” I thought they were attractive, but I guess I had different tastes.

busy, and it became harder and harder to go back to Baker Street. It was hard to turn down the work. It was nice to not be hungry and worried. MM: Did they offer you the Phantom Stranger one-shot before you finished your first Sandman Mystery Theater arc? GD: Come to think of it, that might have been what stopped me from going back to Baker Street the first time. I think they offered me Phantom Stranger right after I finished “The Tarantula.” That was fun. It was flattering that they were trying to put me on more work. It made it feel more like job security in a way. And being quick and making deadlines while giving them the level of quality they expected was what kept me getting more and more work from them. MM: You mentioned how slow you were while doing Baker Street. Is this when you started working at a faster pace? GD: Yeah, definitely. Sandman Mystery Theater is the series that taught me the most about discipline as an artist. When you’re doing your own book, you’re your 24

MM: Your women had a ’40s feel to them. GD: Yeah, but looking back I can definitely tell when it was deadline crunch time. The art got rougher and the faces got rounder. I was taking more shortcuts, which is embarrassing, but they needed it done and that was the main drive. The sales were the sales, whether I took my time or not. They just needed it on the stands, so there was a lot of pressure to get it done. I didn’t have much chance to experiment; it was always done on the fly. If I wanted to do something different, it had to be there on the page in the storytelling. I’m a little embarrassed by the rough work I did, but as I always tell people, you do the best you can in the time you have. If I had more time, it would look better, but I didn’t have more time. I just did the best I could. MM: How much time did they give you to do the Phantom Stranger story? I mean, it was a 56-page story. Did you have any cushion room, or was it non-stop go? GD: It was pretty non-stop. I probably had more cushion room on the earlier issues of Mystery Theater. It was near the end of the series when it got really, really tight. I think

I had a six-month lead time for Phantom Stranger. That was fun and different, and I got to redesign the Phantom Stranger, too. They didn’t pay me as much for redesigning the Phantom Stranger. [laughter] “It’s nice, but...” I forget the reasoning, but it must have made sense, because I took the check. MM: What was your thinking behind the new design? Obviously you got rid of the amulet, and you made him look a little more priestly. GD: I don’t really know where the idea came from. Usually, for me, the first thing is to get rid of the cape. For me, that just says super-hero. You can still have something that flows. In Mystery Theater we had the long trenchcoat. For Phantom Stranger, we didn’t want a trenchcoat, so I gave him a long coat like a priest’s along with the old preacher’s hat. I thought the amulet would just be something that glowed in his neck that from a distance would look like a priest’s collar. I said, “Let’s just make his whole body black. He could be wearing a stocking or he could be just a black form under a coat.” I didn’t want him to blend in with the time period, either. I wanted him to look out of place like he’s a stranger— like Dr. Who, he’s always popping up in the wrong places dressed the way he’s dressed. They liked all those ideas, but I don’t think the design is eye-catching at all. It’s too boring. It’s pretty nondescript. I don’t know if they even used the design again. MM: It was sort of a haunted house story, and you got to draw a couple of monsters. 25

Previous Page: Guy’s editors may have thought Dian looked “too fat” or not attractive enough, but beauty comes in many shapes and sizes, and, in this editor’s opinion, Guy, Matt, and Steven made Dian one of the sexiest women in comics. Sandman Mystery Theater #17, pages 2 and 3. Above: The Phantom Stranger sports a new, less flamboyant look. A panel from Vertigo Visions: The Phantom Stranger. Left: Another Sandman commission illustration. Dian Belmont, Phantom Stranger, Sandman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Did that make it more comfortable for you in undertaking such a big project? GD: Yeah, the monsters were fun, because it was the opposite of what I had been doing on Mystery Theater, which was more grounded in reality. It was still fun getting to draw all those old settings, and I loved old movies growing up—and still do—so it was fun to get to draw that era, but Phantom Stranger definitely let me use more of my imagination. I found out later that that was the first of my work that Mike Mignola saw and liked. He never saw Baker Street. He definitely never saw The Realm. [laughter] I didn’t go around showing that to everybody. “How about this, Mike? Can I draw B.P.R.D.?” [laughter] MM: Now that you were working at DC, did you start thinking about your artwork in terms of color? Up until then, you had only worked in black-&-white. GD: Later on I did. I was never happy with the coloring on Mystery Theater. The colorist who I thought was going to do it colored two pages of the preview, but then they chose somebody else, and I was never happy with the direction it went. The first issue came out and I went, “What the hell?” MM: It was a little garish. GD: It was garish, and they also printed it on the wrong scale. It was reduced by a lot. Everything bled and there were huge white borders. It looked like an old Nancy comic or something, and not in the cool way an old Nancy comic does. It was really bizarre. And I was all pumped. “This is my first big thing! Matt Wagner is writing it! It’s Vertigo!” I remember going to the comic store, and Gary said, “Wow, they did something with the coloring.” I went, “What do you mean?” I picked it up, and I was livid. Not to the point where I was going to tear the place apart, but all that work and effort, and it looked like crap. My work was pretty rough at the time, but I put a lot of effort into it, and it didn’t look like what I was expecting at all. I got a call from Karen, because I had called and said, “I can’t do this. I don’t want to work on this any more. I feel like I’ve wasted my time.” She called and said, “There were a lot of mistakes. We’ll let you make color notes from now on,” which I did, but I still was never that happy with how it turned out. But at least they were printing it at the right size, which helped a lot. I wasn’t working on the regular DC board. I was working in a 12" x 17" image area, like I had been doing with Baker Street. They said, “If you can at least draw on a smaller sheet, that will help a lot.” They sent me some DC boards, and I drew it on the back of the page, because I find the blue line distracting. It reminds me of when you’re young and you have those guides for writing upper and lower case. “Why don’t you just send me a piece of paper? I can make the border. I can rule it.” They didn’t like that I was doing it that way. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t do it like everybody else. I think it boiled down to me saying, “It would take me more time to start drawing smaller, because I’d have to rethink how to design the page.” As soon as I said it would take me more time, they said, “Go ahead and draw on the back.” [laughter] 26

Looking back I think, “What an arrogant idiot I was,” but I was really disappointed. Now I’m a lot more easygoing, but coming off of Baker Street where I was doing everything, I had that outlook of how it should look at the end, and it didn’t match that at all. Karen was wonderful. She was very patient and understanding, and she wanted me to keep working on it. MM: Did you talk much with Matt Wagner as you were working on the series? GD: Oh, yeah. He would tell me the story ideas he had for what was coming up, and I would send him copies of my designs as I sketched them out. He’d call up and we’d go over it again, and then DC would see the designs and layouts, too. It was an easy and great collaboration. Matt’s a wonderful guy. He’s very encouraging and very open to hearing any ideas you have. And if he said, “No, that’s a crap idea,” at least he listened. It was nice to have a writer who would listen to different ideas. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. MM: Do you think it helped you in breaking in with the Big Two having a writer who was also a great artist in his own right? GD: Oh, yeah. I think just having him say he wanted me to draw it was my break. I had sent out stuff before. I talked with John Ostrander, because I liked Grimjack, and he liked Baker Street. He told me, “It would be great if we can get you working on something— “Spider-Man vs. the Punks” or something like that.” [laughter] I kept saying, “I can draw anything. Give me a chance.” That’s why it was nice that Matt wasn’t just saying, “Guy can just draw punk stuff.” I could’ve kept on doing my own stories, and I could’ve easily gotten them printed. But as far as making a living at it and reaching a wider audience, it was Matt who got me that. MM: What was it like coming back for the second arc, now that you’d become familiar with the characters and with DC’s deadlines? GD: It was refreshing. I looked at the first issues and saw the things I hated about what I was doing, so I was thinking, “Now’s my chance. I’ll do it better this time and try to get it right.” That’s how I approached every issue after that. “Okay, I did that wrong. Now I’m going to do this.” I do that now even with B.P.R.D. and The Marquis. I look at what I’ve done before, and once you’ve had a break from it you do it the way you know you’re supposed to do it, but you approach it a little differently—with new life. 27

Previous Page: 1995 promotional art for Sandman Mystery Theater. Below: Model sheet for the Park Phantom for Sandman Mystery Theater Annual #1.

just hit it off. It was a very easy collaboration, and it spoiled me. I got along great with Matt, and I got along great with Steve, so I thought, “All writers of comics will be like this.” Later on, some of them weren’t so great. Some of them I never even saw or heard from. With fill-ins you just get a script and you deal with the editor; you never hear a word from the writer.

Above: Visually, the Vamp was based on Louise Brooks, the iconic actress of the ’20s and early ’30s who popularized the bob haircut. She starred in the 1929 German film Pandora’s Box—perhaps her greatest role—in which she played a sexually irresistible woman who brings ruin to every man (and woman) who falls in love with her—a character similar in many ways to the Vamp. Next Page: Sandman Mystery Theater #49, page 23.

When that second arc came around, I was excited to do it. The story was just great—all the stories were—and I was really inspired. I was a huge Louise Brooks fan, so I thought, “There we go. I’m going to draw an evil Louise Brooks.” Actually the look of Vamp was based on Louise Brooks and my ex-girlfriend at the time. She had a strong nose and a little bit of a Louise Brooks thing going on, and she was a little bit evil, too. [laughter] MM: Steven Seagle joined the team as cowriter by the time you started work on “The Vamp.” Did that change the dynamic of the team at all? GD: I didn’t notice much of a change. He and Matt worked it all out. I got more of a full script with Steve, but as far as working with him, the first time I talked with him I instantly got along with him. He’s such a great guy. He’s so personable and nice, we 28

MM: Did you continue talking a lot with Matt and Steve, or as things went along did it become more a case of, “Here you go, you know what to do”? GD: A little bit. They knew that if they asked for something that I would reference it, but I would still talk to them along the way. Probably more with Steve later on, because I was dealing more with him on the later issues. After “The Vamp,” the familiarity was there, and they didn’t need to go over it as much, and the editors were always easy to deal with. The editors were always changing at Vertigo. I heard they would give me the new editors, because I was a good person to train with. It didn’t take a lot on their part to get the book done. It was a good way to start editors. “You have to deal with Matt and Steve, then just send it to Guy. Check up on Guy, get it in, and whatever you do, show him the color guide.” [laughter] I got along well with all the editors I had on Mystery Theater.

myself, but for everybody else it was a layout. [laughter] Vince did a good job, but that’s what started them seeing I could do more work and still get it done. They said, “Well, if you want to keep doing it, we’ll just have you do it ongoing.” I didn’t draw too many back to back issues before they cancelled the book. But before then, they kept giving me stuff, so I was happy. There were a couple of instances where they asked if I wanted to try submitting something to write. I made a couple of proposals, but they didn’t work out. I don’t think I had the mindset for it. Karen would say, “Why don’t you write a pitch for a Batman Elseworlds story?” I’d write a pitch, and they’d say, “We don’t really like that.”

MM: At what point was it decided that you would be the regular artist rather than just in a rotation? GD: It may have been around the time I was doing the layouts for the arc that Vince Locke worked on. They kept asking me, “Do you want to come back?” but they didn’t have anything else they could put me on. I don’t know if other artists enjoyed doing the book or not, but their list of artists got shorter. It started out as me and two other people, then it was two for me and one for one other person, then it was just all me. One of the people they asked was Vince Locke. I was like, “That’s cool. Vince is a friend.” Then they called me up and said, “Well, we thought about it and decided we don’t really want Vince to do it. We want you to do it.” I said, “Vince is a friend, and you’re asking me to take work from him. If I did the layouts and Vince did the finishes, would that be okay?” and they liked that solution. I talked to Vince and explained it to him, and Vince is an easygoing guy. I said, “It’s either you work from my layouts or they’re not going to have you do it at all. It’s not fair to you, Vince. You don’t need me doing layouts. You know how to tell a story.” But they thought something was missing in his work. I didn’t understand it myself, but they went with me doing the layouts. That was a cushy job. [laughter] MM: How detailed were your layouts? Were they just sketches or were they fairly tight? GD: They were rough. I wasn’t detailing the faces at all, because they had to be Vince’s faces. It was more just the placement of things. I would lay out the page and say, “Here’s Dian, here’s Wes. Here are some cows in a field,” and I would just scribble a shape. It was just placement and breaking down the story. I did the same thing later on for Brave Old World and Catwoman. When I did Brave Old World they said it wasn’t tight enough, and when I did Catwoman they said it was too tight. When I was doing Catwoman, that was just how I was penciling, which was just quick and sloppy for 29

MM: Were you pitching ideas for the mainstream DC universe and Vertigo?

Below: Box art for the Alice in the Land of Nod model kit. Too bad the comic series based on Guy’s drawings for the sculptures never got off the ground. Next Page: Promotional art for Guy’s creatorowned series, The Marquis. Alice in the Land of Nod, The Marquis ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

GD: There were two Batman pitches. I had no familiarity with the character aside from the first couple of movies and the TV show. I’d read Dark Knight and The Killing Joke, but I never followed the character. I sent out a pitch anyway, since Karen had asked. The first pitch was an Elseworlds idea inspired by Schuiten and his Cities of the Fantastic books. I wanted to do something about Gotham City and its architecture. I don’t remember the plot, which probably explains why they didn’t accept it. [laughter] The second idea was an Anarky story, and that didn’t go anywhere, either. Obviously, those were both for DCU, but they started with Karen asking me to pitch something, or maybe it was someone in DCU asking her to ask me. I wasn’t really jazzed about either story, but

when you’re looking for work and there’s an opening, you have to try it. Later on, I did a drawing of this gothy, androgynous Alice in Wonderland sitting on top of the Cheshire Cat, which I later had made into a sculpture. I had met a sculptor, Michael Waltz, and he cast it in resin and made a model kit out of it. I liked how it turned out, so I designed up a whole bunch of other characters for it. I heard Vertigo was interested in doing a dark, gothy Alice in Wonderland, so I sent them the drawings I had done for the sculptures. I wanted to do Alice in a similar way to how I had done Baker Street, where you would say, “Oh, that’s Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but it’s all messed up.” I didn’t want to do a straight adaptation. But they said, “We want it to be more like Alice in Wonderland, just with your characters.” I said, “Then you’re just changing the names. It either has to be exactly like Alice in Wonderland or it has to be something that takes the mythos and does something different with it.” We just couldn’t find a middle ground with that. Then they said, “Why don’t you try that with ‘Snow White and Rose Red’?” Again, there was the same problem where they wanted it to be so much like the original story that there wasn’t anything unique about it. Everybody who read Alice in Wonderland would know what was going to happen, and the same with “Rose Red.” They didn’t want anything that deviated so much that people would think it was something different. It never got farther than the model kits. I didn’t sell the Alice pitch to DC, so I still own it, but I never went back to it because I wasn’t that interested. The “Rose Red” was something they specifically asked for, so I never did anything else with it, either, because I assume it to be theirs. After that I stopped pitching ideas, because I decided that if I want to do my own thing, I’ll just do it with a smaller publisher to have more freedom. MM: Did the pitch process get you thinking about other things you wanted to do? Were you starting to think of projects you wanted to do outside of DC? GD: Not so much for DC. I was enjoying my time there, and I was getting steady work. Actually, I did pitch one more story—a oneoff story with Cain and Abel—but that didn’t

go anywhere. Again, that was just because they asked if I would give it a try. They kept asking me for pitches, but they never took anything. At least they asked. [laughter] I was still thinking up ideas I wanted to do for myself. I was feeling really inspired around that time. Whether it was just the age I was or the feeling of security I had, I had sketchbooks just filled with ideas. It wasn’t anything I wanted to submit to Vertigo or DC, mainly because I knew I wanted to have control over everything. I knew I could do Sandman Mystery Theater and make good money and pay the bills, and that gave me more freedom to do indie and small press work. I never saw a dividing line between indie and mainstream work. People often thought indie was a bad word. “Once you start doing mainstream work, you can’t do indie work.” To me it’s all comics. MM: When did you start developing The Marquis? GD: It was during Mystery Theater. At the time, I wasn’t able to find a lot of other work as far as fill-ins. People, I guess, started seeing me only as a guy who can draw people talking. I was drawing period pieces, and they couldn’t see me drawing anything fantastic or larger than life. I was kind of pigeon-holed. People at Marvel told me, “I like your stuff well enough, but I don’t know what I can put you on. Maybe if we did Spider-Man in the 1930s...” I was at a convention—I think it was a Chicago Comic-Con. I love Gary Gianni’s stuff—he’s just amazing—and I met him for the first time at that show. Seeing the stuff he was doing on The Shadow just blew me away. “That’s what Sandman Mystery Theater should look like.” I told him, “You should really be doing Sandman Mystery Theater instead of me. Your stuff is so beautiful.” He didn’t have any interest in it. He said, “Well, I’m doing my own thing now: Monstermen,” and he showed me some pages. One was this beautiful, bizarre page of the main character next to an ocean liner stuck in a mountainside. He said, “See, I want to draw stuff like this, but no one will let me, so I’m going to draw it myself.” That stuck in my head. “Why am I trying to get work drawing anything else? If I want to draw something, I should just make up a story and draw it.” That spurred me on to start working up The Marquis. I had always loved the time period of the 18th Century, and you don’t see that a lot in comics; everything is either Victorian or futuristic or set in the ’40s. So I start-

ed cobbling together things I wanted to draw, and that led to me sketching out The Marquis. MM: At that point the market was in a nose-dive after the speculator crash. Were you worried at all that by the time you finished a story there might not be a market left? GD: Yeah, there was that worry. I had Caliber, and they were always interested. I first mentioned it to them in 1995, ’96. There was a ghost story I had been playing around with before I left Caliber to do Sandman Mystery Theater, and it had been a while since I had done Baker Street. I wanted to do something to show I could do more than these two books I was so closely associated with. I shelved the ghost story and pitched them The Marquis, and Gary liked the idea and thought it was different, so I had that as a ground to go to. That made it easier, and the fact that he published it as a preview issue. One, I just wanted to get it out there; and, two, I could say, “Here’s a short story and some sketches. If people hate it, I’m not going to force it down their throats. I’ll go back to Baker Street.” 31

Above: Panels from Guy’s short story within a story for 1997’s House of Secrets #12. The story was printed in black-&white with gray tones and spots of red. In the case of these panels, the flower—representing the budding passion of the two doomed lovers— and its petals are the only things colored red. Next Page: Page 7 of “Devil’s Labyrinth” from Grendel: Black, White & Red #3. There was actually very little spotting of red in this story, and this page was left completely black-&-white. House of Secrets ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Grendel ™ and ©2010 Matt Wagner.

Having Caliber say they’d publish it made it easier. It wasn’t anything I was interested in going to anybody else with— certainly not DC or Marvel. I hadn’t even thought of Dark Horse at the time, even though I loved their books. MM: You had it in mind to be black-&white from the very beginning? GD: Oh, yeah. I love old movies and that texture they have—that sort of graininess. One of the inspirations for The Marquis is Murnau’s Faust, which is one of my favorite movies. The copy I had was a kino version, but it still had that texture. I wanted to emulate that in black-&-white with the zipatone. I didn’t want it to look slick and clean. And from the beginning I wanted the Hell chapter to be in red. I think Caliber was okay with that because it was so far off when we did the preview issue. [laughter] “Well, if it sells, we’ll do the red tinting.” MM: You’ve used that technique a few times in your career. There was your story in House of Secrets #12 and your short story for Grendel: Black, White & Red #3. How much thinking goes into color placement when you’re doing a story like that? Are you looking at it panel-by-panel or for overall balance? 32

GD: On The Marquis it was easy, because anything that had to do with the actual world of Hell was red. It wasn’t like I was spotting red eyes. Whenever the Marquis went to hell, he remained black-&-white, because he is still part of the living world; everything else was values of red. With Grendel: Black, White & Red, it was a little harder. I did a guide and spotted what I thought should be red. Matt went through and changed some things, but he’s got a better eye for that than me. Whatever he wanted it to be I was fine with. With House of Secrets, I think I spotted some things on that, but Steven went through and said, “How about this, too?” It might just be because I think more in terms of black-&-white and was never interested in doing color work. It’s easier for me to wrap my head around adding one color than six different values. I see what Dave Stewart does on B.P.R.D. and anything else I do, and it’s just amazing what he comes up with, especially from my notes that say, “This is a cloud. This is wood.” He’ll come back with six different values of wood. MM: Since we’re on the subject, a Grendel black-&-white story with spots of red makes sense; it fits that world. Why did they decide to do that with the House of

Secrets story? The story is set in the past, but that was still unusual, even for Vertigo. GD: I don’t know. It wasn’t a cost issue. I was never happy with the colorist I had on Mystery Theater, so maybe I was asking to do a black-&-white story. The grays were done digitally by the colorist, so it must have been Vertigo was doing it to make the story different. MM: You were also doing the dream sequences for Mystery Theater in black-&white. You went pretty wild with those sometimes. GD: Those were fun. He had twisted dreams. I think I suggested, “Let’s do that in black-&-white and tone like I did in Baker Street, just to set it off from the regular story.” It didn’t mean he was insane, it was just a way of saying when you turned the page, “Okay, this a dream sequence. This is not part of the story.” MM: Did you have any problem when the super-heroes started creeping into the stories? There was Hour-Man, the Crimson Avenger, and an origin story for the Mist. GD: I didn’t have any problem with that. It was fine by me, because they were treated like the old heroes and villains. They were the guys dressed in the goofy capes which seemed to fit in more with the 1940s than now. When Mike Mignola did Gotham by Gaslight, I loved that. That made sense. I could see someone dressed up like that running around in Victorian times more than I could now, where they’d just get mugged. Since it was a different setting, it seemed fine. You think of people being more innocent back then, even though they weren’t. And I drew them in my rumply style, where everybody looks like they’re wearing cosplay outfits. I’m not showing huge, muscled chests under the Hour-Man costume. It’s kind of ill-fitting. And the Crimson Avenger was akin to drawing the Shadow, which I’ve always loved, so I didn’t have a problem with any of the stories or ideas they had for Mystery Theater. They were all fun. I was doing pulp stories rather than Green Lantern or something. I have no interest in that genre, and I wasn’t really interested in moving past Vertigo and doing that type of book.

MM: Around this time, 1997, you also did a story for Negative Burn with Neil Gaiman. GD: Not really with Neil Gaiman. They had a story from Neil Gaiman, and I adapted it for two pages over a weekend. MM: So there was no direct collaboration? GD: No, no. It probably was approved through Neil Gaiman’s agent, if anything, but it was fun. It was a short job I could fit in beside Mystery Theater. I was doing a lot of illustrations for White Wolf Games around that time, too. Those were easy to fit in. 35

Previous Page and Above: Twisted dreams, indeed! In this sequence from “The Butcher” Wesley seems to be falling to pieces [SMT #27, page 17], and in the final dream sequence of the series Wesley gets a more direct message from that other Sandman [SMT #50, page 37]. Sandman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Right: This fetish illustration became a cover for Negative Burn. Below: Illustration for White Wolf’s Ghouls: Fatal Addiction RPG. White Wolf decided to “push the envelope,” and Guy’s work certainly fit the bill. Next Page: Vampires take a train. Okay, it’s a pretty freaking cool train, but after the freedom he had doing illustrations for Ghouls, it must have been difficult to have to go back to drawing the more mundane things they wanted for Vampire: The Masquerade.

MM: That was during White Wolf’s peak, I think. They did the Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game and a bunch of spin-offs from that. Were you just doing illustrations for their game manuals? GD: Spot illustrations, some color work, character designs for the character sheets—things like that. I met one of the editors at a convention while I was doing Mystery Theater. It might have been the same convention where

I met Gary Gianni. I was with Vince Locke, and I said, “We should try doing this stuff on the side. It could be fun.” He said okay, so I got up and went by their table and introduced myself. The editor, Larry Snelly, read comics and knew of Sandman Mystery Theater. He said, “Oh, yeah. If you’re interested in doing some illustration work for us, that would be great.” When I got back from the con, he had called and given me a small project for one of their darker lines, Ghouls: Fatal Addiction. I didn’t know about this ’til later. I had still been doing some fetish illos on the side. He wanted some weird stuff, so I sent him some drawings. He said, “Oh, that’s great. Sure, we’ll push the envelope.” I was like, “It’s not that weird.” But one of the illos I did was this woman in fetish gear with a symbiotic twin sticking out of her stomach. Her ghoul slave was in front of her looking like he was about to go down on her symbiotic 36

Below: An illustration for White Wolf’s slightly askew super-hero RPG, Aberrant. Next Page: With Terminator and Aliens, Guy was able to show editors he was not a two-trick pony. Page 2 of Terminator #0.

twin. [laughter] It was freaky. Ever since seeing Freaks growing up, I liked drawing that kind of stuff. It’s fun to draw weird stuff like that. I sent it in, he said it was great, so I toned it up and sent in the finished work. Years later I heard that he really had to go to bat for that. People were ready to walk, I guess because they thought it was underage material. It was a symbiotic twin, so it was the same age as the woman. It was just a deformed body. But people were really

bothered by it. Larry loved it because that was the type of thing they wanted to show that this line wasn’t like the others, and it got me a lot more work with him. When he left later on, I still did some work for White Wolf—covers and things. I started off doing this really bizarre stuff for them, and I loved it. I was designing monsters and weird vampires. I hate that whole sunglasses and leather jacket crap. I was drawing nosferatu like they had the plague. I wanted these things to look like they were beasts. But as it went on, I got requests to do full pages of a vampire boardroom meeting. “No monsters, just people in a boardroom.” It just kept getting more and more mundane, and I was getting burnt out. After Sandman Mystery Theater was cancelled, I still kept working for them because I needed the money, but eventually it was too much. I was not inspired, and I was turning out stuff I wasn’t happy with, so I just stopped accepting work from them. MM: How long did you work for them? GD: About seven years, and it was pretty steady work at times. It was a quick turnaround, too. You’d get a call, then you’d get a script, and two weeks later they wanted the illustrations done. MM: Did you look for similar work at other companies or did you have enough on your plate? GD: I did work for one other gaming company who screwed me—along with everybody else—out of money. I even said, “Do you mind if I work for this rival company?” and they said, “No, go ahead. It’s no big deal.” I did one job for them, which I put a lot into because it was more imaginative stuff with more freedom. But they screwed me, so I just went back to White Wolf because at least they paid me. [laughter] And they did give me some other stuff on the side. There was Aberrant, their super-hero RPG—I did a couple of illustrations for that—and they had a pulp RPG called Adventure!, which I did. But near the end it was just a lot of Vampire stuff, and I just wasn’t really happy with it. I’m sure they probably weren’t very happy with what I was doing, either.

Part 4:

Guy Gets More Adventurous in a pitch for Aliens: Survival, and that’s what started it— that and Terminator. Somebody bowed out of a Terminator job and they needed it done in a week or two. So I did Terminator #0, with the great Geof Darrow cover. It was fun to do, because, again, it was something that nobody else was asking me to do. Nobody thought I could draw anything besides 1930 period pieces, and here Dark Horse was saying, “Draw Terminator. Just don’t draw any nudity.”

MM: How did you get in with Dark Horse? Your first work for them was Aliens: Havok. Did Matt help you get in contact with them?

GD: Maybe. There were a lot of artists involved with Aliens: Havok. That was after Mystery Theater got cancelled, and I wasn’t able to get work anywhere. That was a rough time. Right before Mystery Theater got cancelled I decided I was going to buy a house. You can tell where this is going to go. [laughter] I called up my editor and asked, “Things are good, right? I’m going to buy a house. Sales are good? You still like me?” “Yeah, things are good. The book will be around for a while. You don’t have to worry.” And Vertigo actually helped me with the house purchase. If I needed a check a little early, they made sure I got it in time. I sunk every bit of savings I had into getting this house. I loved this house; it was perfect for what I wanted. I figured, “I’ll put everything I can into the payments, live lean for a couple of months, and I can make it up with the next run of Mystery Theater.” Two months after we got the house, they called saying, “After this next storyline, we’re cancelling the book. And it’s not going to be four issues, it’s going to be two. But we’re going to keep you busy. Don’t worry.” They gave me nothing. I was scrambling. I couldn’t really do The Marquis like I had planned, because I had nothing else to buffer it with. I was sending out stuff to everybody again. I was back in that line, basically. Somewhere along the way I got the one-pager for Aliens: Havoc, and that was great because every other company I was trying for was saying, “We don’t have anything set in 1930 for you. And you can’t draw pretty women.” I said, “Give me something with monsters in it.” “No, we don’t have anything with monsters in the 1930s.” [laughter] Then all of a sudden I got something that was just the opposite from that. It was monsters, but in the future. I drew that one page, and I loved it because I loved the movies and H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb’s designs. As soon as I did that one-pager, somebody sent 39

I went back and forth with them on that. I said, “Are they like Barbie dolls? Can I draw them without any junk?” They said, “No, they’re fully equipped like real people, just don’t show it.” I had to go through and take out the butt cracks, because Twentieth Century Fox didn’t want them to be seen. So everybody has these weird, flat butts. [laughter] MM: Did you have to get into a different mindset when working on Aliens or Terminator? GD: No, not really. I referenced it heavily. I had the laserdisc for Aliens, so when I was designing new interiors for the settlement I knew what the design sense was for that universe. Looking back, it’s very rough. I was very unsure at the time, because I was insane with worry. You can tell I didn’t have a clear head for a lot of the stuff. I was getting it done, but it’s not the best job I’ve done. I wish I could look back at it the way I do with Mystery Theater, because I was hitting my stride there, but Dark Horse seemed happy with it. As far as drawing it, I enjoyed the story and getting to draw the monsters. MM: How did the Batman: Shadow of the Bat job come about? GD: I think that came about because nobody wanted to draw a Batman story that didn’t have Batman or anything really fantastic in it. “You want me to draw Batman: Shadow of the Bat?” “Yeah.” “Batman’s in it?” “No, it’s all about this one old man in this house, and the story is from his perspective.” It was a neat idea for a story, but I heard later that nobody else wanted to draw it. There’s a shot of Joker at the end and other little things. It was funny, though, for the first page I drew this panoramic shot of Gotham City spread out behind the old man’s house. I got a call from my editor saying, “You drew Gotham City in the background.” I said, “Yeah. Batman, right? Gotham City?” I’m thinking I screwed up and drew the wrong city or something. He said, “Well, it’s destroyed. There was an earthquake.” He had just assumed that everybody in the world knew Gotham City was in ruins. [laughter] “Why don’t people tell me these things? I didn’t know Gotham was destroyed.” So I took out the white-out pen and took chunks off the buildings and roughed them up. [laughter]

The other thing I had to change was the Joker’s chin. Loving old movies, I said, “I’m going to draw the Joker looking like Conrad Veidt from The Man Who Laughs. That’s who has was based on, anyway.” I drew him with the big grin, but no chin, which I think looks more freaky. “No, he’s got to have a chin.” So I went back, drew a chin, and fax it back to them. “No, he’s got a big chin.” So I went back and redrew the chin. We went through that four times. At the end I put this huge, pointy chin on him, and they loved it. MM: How did you get involved with Oni Press? GD: It was in between work when I was looking to do other things. I met Bob Schreck, who was in charge of Oni, at a convention. I had just finished dinner and was leaving the restaurant. I said hi to Matt Wagner on the way out, and he introduced me to Bob. Matt said to Bob, “He’s got a new book. You should look at it for Oni.” Caliber had been having problems and I was looking to take The Marquis someplace else that was a more secure fit. Caliber had already solicited the first couple of issue of The Marquis, but there was no way I could do it through them. There were no bad feelings or anything, it just wasn’t working out. So I worked up a pitch to send to Oni, but by the time I sent it in 41

Previous Page: After a one-page contribution to Aliens: Havoc, Guy penciled and inked the three-issue Aliens: Survival mini-series. Above: While there was no Batman and a mostly destroyed Gotham City, at least Guy was able to draw two pages of the Joker—though not as Conrad Veidt as he had hoped. Panel from Batman: Shadow of the Bat #86. Aliens ™ and ©2010 20th Century Fox Film Corp. Joker ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

Below: The Blair Witch Project was a flash in the pan, but it was a pretty big flash. Blair Witch Chronicles #1, page 14. Next Page: This page of illustrations was drawn for the Nevermen series pitch.

Bob had already left to work at DC. Joe Nozemack and Jamie Rich looked at it, and they liked the pitch and said they’d do it. MM: But you worked on The Blair Witch Project before The Marquis came out. GD: Blair Witch was a property Oni had gotten, and they wanted me to do a short story for it. That was before it went crazy and everybody fell in love with the first film. The people involved with the film said they would set up a screening for me and a few of my friends at my local theater. The people at the theater were like, “We don’t know what this is, but they said

to show it to you.” I liked it, but it made me a little queazy from motion sickness. I liked it because it was kind of like a firstperson video game. You get lost into what’s going on, and so much is left to the imagination. I thought it worked great, because you were filling in the blanks with your own sick ideas—and I was thinking up some really sick stuff. [laughter] Right at the very end the lights came on and we all jumped. The cleaning crew didn’t know we were in the there watching a movie. That scared us more than anything. “What’s going on? She’s walking down into the basement!” and then suddenly the lights come on. “Sorry, we didn’t know anyone was in here.” [laughter] It was nice of them to set that up, and it inspired me to want to work on the story. When the comic came out, everybody was nuts for the film, so they decided to do a sequel. I was like, “Sure. People will love this.” By the time the sequel came out, people hated the movie. “Oh, Blair Witch. I’m so sick of that.” [laughter] I don’t know if it did well or not, but people didn’t seem to be impressed by it. [laughter] MM: Were you working on Nevermen while you were working on The Marquis? GD: The Marquis was always in the background with whatever paying work I could get. It was hard to justify taking the time off just to work on The Marquis, which was royalty-based. Even though there was an advance, the advance was so small compared to the time it took to ink and tone it. There were a couple of months where I had nothing lined up and I focused on The Marquis just to keep busy. But Nevermen took precedent over working on The Marquis. MM: How did Nevermen come about? Did Phil Amara come to you? GD: Yes, Phil came to me. He was an editor at Dark Horse on Aliens. Dark Horse wanted him to come up with a pitch for a property that Dark Horse would own. Phil wrote up a treatment and sent it to me. It had goggles in it, so I was like, “I love goggles.” [laughter] He had ideas for these bizarre villains. “Ooh, I like the sound of that, too.” I love the old Dick Tracy strips, and that’s what I thought of this as: a weird, futuristic Dick

Tracy. He sort of saw it as a cross between L.A. Confidential, which I hadn’t seen, and Dark City, which I hadn’t seen, either. I said, “That’s cool, but let’s make it really bizarre looking, too.” I didn’t want it to be like Mystery Theater, where people would think, “Oh, he’s going back to drawing people in hats.” “Let’s treat this like Dick Tracy. Let’s really get bizarre with these villains, and not give any reason why they look that way.” I wanted it to be eye candy. The editors at Dark Horse were asking, “Why does he look like this? What’s wrong with him? What’s the story behind this?” I said, “No, no. Don’t even think about it. The thing is that no one bats an eye that these guys look like freaks, whether they have a fish head or whatever. What the people are scared about is that they are organized crime. They’re scared that they’re thugs and they might shoot them. Treat it like Dick Tracy. They just happen to have those looks, and that makes 44

it interesting.” They went with that, and we never really had a backstory. It is its own reality, and the Nevermen are crime-fighters against these bizarre monsters. Phil gave me pretty much free rein to go nuts. All of his descriptions were too derivative at first. There was Manboulian, who had the top part of his head as just a skull. Phil originally wanted him to be like Two-Face, where part of his face is disfigured and the other part is normal. I said, “You can’t do that. It’s been done. People will think it’s a rip-off.” I had a lot of works on old anatomy exhibits, and sometimes they would show a slice of someone’s skull in formaldehyde. That looks really freaky. It’s one thing to see a skull. You see so many skulls throughout your life that they kind of lose their spookiness. But halfskull, half-meat, where you don’t have to worry about how it stays fresh.... I would do things like that, where I would take his basic description and turn it around.

MM: Nevermen started out as a serial in Dark Horse Presents and then you got a follow-up mini-series.

While it was coming out, one of the big complaints was that people weren’t really understanding where it was going or what it was all about. At the same time, I was working on The Marquis, so I had it in my mind that, “Oh, God. I’ve got to make sure that people understand what I’m doing.” So I did the reverse with The Marquis, where every issue basically restated the premise, which was a huge mistake on my part. I was stupidly not wanting to do a recap on the inside front cover. I was wanting to include it in the story so if someone just picked it up and started reading it they could understand what the story was within the first couple of pages, not thinking that when it would be collected the reader would get hit over the head with a recap with every new chapter.

GD: It was probably the same idea as the Marquis prelude, and they just wanted to test it and see what the response would be. MM: I assume this was being developed as a potential film property. GD: Yeah, I assume that’s what Dark Horse wanted to do with it. I don’t know where it’s at now or what’s going on with it. The mini-series didn’t do what they wanted it to do. They were paying me work-for-hire rates, so maybe they didn’t recoup their costs. There was a clause in my contract that, since I designed it, I get first refusal on any new Nevermen comics. If they decide to do a third Nevermen series, they’ll ask me if I want to do it. If I don’t, they can get someone else. And there’s a royalty across the board if anything becomes of it. But it just hasn’t gone anywhere. It didn’t have enough of a direction for the story, I guess. It was too out there. I think people were expecting to understand a lot of things with the second series, and it was just more of the same and it didn’t click with them. I have people come up at cons and say, “Are you going to do more Nevermen? It looks great, but I don’t know what it’s about.” At least they’re buying it. I’m okay with that. [laughter]

MM: While you’re reading the first couple of issues, you don’t know if he’s really seeing these demons he’s hunting or if he’s just insane. Even when he goes to Hell, you can’t be 100% completely sure he’s not dreaming it all up. So even with the recaps, there is that bit of mystery left in the story. GD: That’s good. I was worried it would sound hamfisted, and that’s why I took out a lot of the dialogue on those recap pages for the Dark Horse Inferno collection, so it would read smoother in one reading. Hopefully it reads smoother. We didn’t say we were going to be making changes, because I didn’t want people to think they had to buy it if they already owned the original version. 46

It was done with new readers in mind. We just got rid of a lot of the repetitiveness and also fixed the French. I was using a Pig Latin version of French when I first wrote it. [laughter] I was mixing up French with Italian, because originally—and it would have been a complete mess if I had stuck with it—since it was its own reality, I was making up words. There was going to be a glossary in the back to explain what things meant. I was mixing two different languages into a third language, and it was making my head hurt. [laughter] So with Inferno, my editor on it, Rachel Edidin, had a friend who was fluent in French go through it and help me fix it. MM: How old do you see your hero, Vol de Galle? GD: He’s probably in his 60s. He’s supposed to be old. I don’t know if I draw him as a young 60-something or a rough-looking 60-something. Just like with Baker Street, where I wanted to do it because there were no books with strong, female leads, one of the first treatments of The Marquis had a 45-year-old woman as the Marquis. But I’d already done that. So I wanted to do something with the lead character that you don’t really see a lot. With the Marquis I wanted there to be experience behind his actions. I didn’t want him to be a young kid not sure of what he’s doing. I wanted him to be an old man who realizes his life was a lie. It’s more tragic. To me, it made it more interesting to draw. The craggy, experienced faces, I thought, were more interesting. MM: It sounds like you went through a long development process. When did you start to feel that the story was coming together? GD: I just kept scratching out different things before I drew any of the pages. Originally, the Marquis was an older woman who was going to be trying to go back and save her daughter from the Inquisition. She was going to infiltrate the Ministry, shoot her way out with her daughter, and try to bring down the Church, but it just seemed too derivative. It didn’t seem that interesting once I started thinking about it.

From the very beginning, the book was an excuse for me to draw the Marquis fighting monsters. I liked the design of the Marquis, and I wanted it to be almost a monster of the week scenario. “Who does he fight this week, and how does he kill him?” But I knew that would get old quick, too. I thought up three or four scenarios for devils that I used later on in the series, but as a story itself it was just a lot of fight scenes and there wasn’t enough to it. That’s when I started thinking about the motivation behind the character. I started thinking of him as an old man, and not as a hero—because he isn’t. The story revolves around him, but there are other things going on with the General that are 47

Previous Page Top: A panel from The Nevermen. Previous Page Bottom: Even monsters like to read. A spot illustration of a few of the villains of The Nevermen. Above: Cover art for The Marquis: Danse Macabre TPB collection.

probably more identifiable with people. The Marquis is the villain of the piece. And once I started thinking of sanity and insanity as a mystery for the first series, the rest just popped into my head as I went along. And that happens. Usually at night, I’ll just lay in bed and I’ll think of something and have to get up and write it down. I might be inking something else, and I’ll make notes for The Marquis. There wasn’t one stroke of inspiration. It was just me working through ideas. “Okay, this idea doesn’t work. What if I tried this?” Certain things just fell together based in large part on what I wanted to draw at the time. I wanted to draw devils instead of monsters. I wanted to draw the 18th Century. I wanted it to be snowing, because I love winter. I didn’t want to do the typical horror setting with thunderstorms and rain, but I wanted something that seemed spooky. In winter you get to see the dead trees and snow. To me it’s beautiful, but there’s something about the cold. Maybe it comes from watching The Shining growing up. [laughter] It seems so desolate. There are a lot of things in The Marquis that are just window dressing. There’s no reason given why it’s always winter. MM: There’s also the “innocent as new-fallen snow” metaphor which makes a nice contrast to the city full of devils and sinners. GD: That’s a smarter answer than I had. I ought to change my answer. “It has to do with the innocence of new-fallen snow...” We’ll edit all that other stuff out. [laughter] I thought backwards when I added the prologue with La Misere for the first collection. I made it rainy and wet, because I liked the idea of that time period of the Marquis’ world being that way. Again, there was no reasoning why, it’s just for whatever reason the world became perpetual winter. People wrote in, and a couple of them had really cool ideas like, “I’ve got it! It’s always winter because the city is really one circle of Hell that’s in perpetual winter.” And I would say, “That’s a cool idea, but no. I just like winter.” [laughter] MM: I thought it was an interesting choice to use horses as the design base for the devils. You talk about this a bit in the sketch-

book section of the collection, but how did you come to settle on that design choice? GD: I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to do devils that looked like guys in loincloths with wings—Christian devil archetypes. I was inspired a lot by the old Bruegel and Bache paintings, which have all these bizarre ideas for what demons would look like. I was thinking along those lines, where things were so bizarre you weren’t able to say, “Oh, it’s got wings and hooves. It’s a devil.” I told myself I wasn’t going to draw them with horns, but with skulls and teeth and tentacles—things that, to me, look more bizarre and horrific. 49

Previous Page and Above: If the Marquis (dressed all in black) is the villain, then the General (dressed all in white) is the hero of the story, right? Well, he’s the closest thing this world has to offer anyway. Really, there is no black-&-white in Guy’s story, but only shades of gray. The Marquis and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

Right: The Devil makes his grand entrance. Below: Cover art for The Marquis: Hell’s Courtesan #1, the first issue of a two-part series—one of the “side stories” of The Marquis. Next Page: The Marquis tracks down a devil in pages 6 and 7 of Hell’s Courtesan #1.

I started collecting horse skulls once I got one. You know, once you’ve got one, you’ve got to get two more. [laughter] There’s something about horse skulls. They aren’t like human skulls, but there’s an identity and a face to them. But it doesn’t really make you think of a horse. I just find them kind of creepy looking, and they have character to them. I was thinking, too, that when they escaped Hell, the horses represented freedom. All of those things just sort of came together. I was sketching out different ideas for the main Devil, and I didn’t want it to look like a devil because it was basically representing Hell. It wasn’t really an entity, all of Hell was him. I needed something to be his figurehead, and something clicked that it should look like this thing they taunted Vol with in the first issue, which was this horse’s skull sticking out of a living horse’s rear and wearing the Marquis’ mask. He changes from that, but that’s his basic form. My Hell was not going to be shy. It wasn’t designed for the censors, where everybody has loincloths. I wanted it to be rude, because that’s the fun part of being sinful. I sent it to Oni, and they said, “Well, that’s different.” I asked them if they had a problem with the Devil being a very anatomically correct horse, and they were fine with it, no problem at all. When the issue came out, I was waiting to hear what people had to say—if I had gone too far with it and if that bit of graphicness of the design was distracting from it overall—but people liked the design. A lot of the responses were along the lines of, “It’s different. A little disturbing.” And that’s just what I wanted it to be: 50

honest and vulgar and obscene in showing what I thought Hell should be. I wanted it to be something people hadn’t seen before. But no one was offended by it; no one wanted to mention it at all. [laughter] “Don’t mention the ascot.”

GD: I had plotted out three books, which told a beginning, middle, and end to the storyline. But while the book was still at Caliber I had also thought up a couple of side stories about different devils with different motivations that didn’t really fit into the main story about Vol. They were focused more on the devils, so I wanted to do them as separate, shorter books just to keep The Marquis out there in print. It was easier to get two issues done as opposed to five, and it kept the series alive and gave me a chance to tell these side stories. Once I hit the last full Marquis series, that’s it. I’m not going to go back to it, so I wanted to get these two side stories out there without having to backtrack. I just wanted to play around with the world a bit before I got to the end and moved on to something else. The Midwife idea was actually just a small part of the second issue of the original Danse Macabre story I had planned back when I was at Caliber. They solicited it, and it was in Previews before I pulled it from Caliber. The more I thought about the Midwife idea, a story built up around it and it seemed to fit in more with where I was going in the last two series of The Marquis. I think it’s a stronger

MM: We talked a bit before about the mystery of whether Vol is insane or not. How big a part of the storyline was that in your mind? GD: I was always certain that he was sane, that he would be possessed by the Devil and working for him. As soon as I got the idea of what I wanted him to be and what his motivation was for hunting these devils, I went through and plotted out the entire story. There is a finite ending. I know exactly how it’s going to end. So I knew he was sane, just doing it for the wrong reasons. Then I just tried to make it a mystery for the reader. I didn’t want him to be insane, where he wakes up and it was all a dream. That would be lame. [laughter] MM: Once you finished Danse Macabre, were you ready to go on to the next story?

the plague, and it wouldn’t be just taking the Marquis character into a different time period. His motivations are different; he’s a different sort of character. And the Devil doesn’t appear as a horse to him—it’s a cockatrice. But that would definitely be it. I love The Phantom, but I don’t want to do that type of thing where you follow his ancestors through the ages. I had played around with La Misere being an ancestor of Vol, but I thought that was too much like a family curse and I didn’t want to go that way. MM: Do you have any interest in doing side-stories on some of the other characters—General Herzoge, for example—or do you feel that would take too much emphasis away from the main story?

story now that I have room to bring more into The Marquis. Now it doesn’t seem like I’m rushing to a conclusion. Above: Pin-up of La Misere, one of the Marquis’s predecessors. Next Page: La Misere and the Marquis face off in The Marquis: Danse Macabre. The Marquis and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

MM: Will that be it then? Do you see any other smaller stories popping up? GD: No, there will be three more series. There will be The Marquis and the Midwife and then two more graphic novels after that. If I do anything else, I’ll do a separate story at the very end that will be a retelling of La Misere’s story and his world and how the Ministry came to power. MM: It would be nice to see more of that character. GD: He’s fun. It would explain more about 52

GD: I’ve never thought of doing anything like that as a side story. The General plays more of a role as the series progresses. Danse Macabre is the big story about Vol. After that he becomes more iconic. He’s the catalyst for a lot of things happening, and you are still treated to things happening with him, but he knows what he has to do now and is taking care of it. Now it’s more about the impact he’s making on the city and how they’re reacting around him. So you’ll see more of the General and Morsea as it goes along until the last book, and then we’ll focus more on Vol again. With The Midwife, you don’t really see the Marquis until 20 pages into the book. There’s a lot of set-up of the world. There’s more of a build-up, so when he shows up, it’s more interesting. MM: How did you get involved with Brave Old World? GD: They always liked my storytelling at Vertigo—probably more than my art I would think—so I was getting a lot of interest in me doing layouts for people, because I could turn those around quickly. After doing the layouts for Vince on Mystery Theater, and it was an easy paycheck, I said, “If you need any more layouts let me know.” They were developing a special line of Y2K books, and they had an idea that they wanted me to lay out. It was pretty straight-forward, so I said yes. Phil Hester did the finished art for it, and he did a great job. He’s wonderful. I don’t know why they didn’t have him do the

whole job, because he knows what he’s doing. I never really understood that. I even said to them, “You want me lay out for Phil Hester? He knows what he’s doing. He’s been around a long time. He doesn’t need me.” Maybe they wanted it done quicker—which I don’t think it does make it any quicker—but I was having a rough time and I needed a paycheck, so I didn’t fight it too much. [laughter]

GD: Yeah. He researched this thing like crazy. It was kind of hard, because I had to find reference for what I needed to draw. He went into historical detail about ice houses and how there were certain places in the street where horses were allowed to urinate, which was cool— it was very interesting—but it was nothing I needed to draw the breakdowns. I had to go through and pick and choose to see what I could fit in. Certain times you work with a writer who doesn’t have a visual eye, but William Messner-Loebs is a great artist. I think a little bit of the problem I was having in clicking with the layouts was that his scripts seemed to be written for himself. He was showing me a lot of notes that were interesting in terms of writing the story, but they were throwing me off as far as what I had to show on the page. It could be that he doesn’t really do full scripts for himself when he draws. If I had to write a full script, I would have to lay it out in thumbnails first and then write out what I had sketched. But it was a fun story, and I got to design the alien ships and some of the characters. Again, looking back on it, that’s all stuff that Phil should have done.

MM: Did you work off a full script from Bill MessnerLoebs?

MM: Were you spotting the blacks in the layouts or just doing rough breakdowns? GD: No. I think he lightboxed from my original pencils onto a separate sheet. We did that on Catwoman, too. I think a lot of times they do it that way so they don’t have to divide up the art, which is fine. I wouldn’t want more than one page anyway— just something I could look at and say, “I remember this.” But the year 2000 came and went, and everybody is still here. [laughter] It was kind of a stupid end of the world worry when you look back on it. MM: You’ve never really inked another artist, have you? GD: No, and I never actually wanted anybody to ink my stuff, because my pencils got looser 54

and looser. After having headaches with Baker Street and The Realm, I just decided that if they wanted an inker that I’d just do layouts. Then it wouldn’t look like my stuff anyway, so I wouldn’t care. MM: You worked with Brian Azzerello on a two-part Hellblazer story, which was set during Constantine’s young, punk rocker days. How did that come about? GD: It was weird, because I thought, “Hey, they remember Baker Street. They want me to draw John as a punk.” No. They had no clue. [laughter] “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They just said you could get it done.” [laughter] It was a bit of a pain in the ass, actually. It wasn’t the best job I ever had. There were a lot of little weird things. They didn’t like me drawing on the back of the page all of a sudden. They made a lot of changes to my art after the fact, which I was really insulted by. If somebody needs me to change something, I’ll change it. But I was getting color notes with the changes already made. I said, “Did you change this?” “Yeah, is that a problem?” I said, “Send it back, and I’ll change it.” “Well, it’s already being printed.” And it was weird changes. I was looking at the pages where John was in the bus terminal, and I said, “Wow, I did a really crappy job on his beard stubble.” It looked like pointillist dots. I figured I must have rushed through it or something. When I got the originals back there were all these paste-ups over all my faces of John. They actually pasted-up over my stubble, which was more of a dash, to make it dots. It was really stupid stuff like that. “What is this? Come on. I’m not a novice. If you needed something done, I would have changed it.” But the editor didn’t care. He was leaving for CrossGen, so he didn’t really care. I couldn’t even say, “I’ll never work for this editor again,” because he left. [laughter] MM: I believe that was the last work you did for Vertigo. Did that experience have anything to do with it? GD: The editor didn’t pick me, and he didn’t care. He was given my name from a higher-up—probably Karen or Shelley

Bond. But as far as why I didn’t get any work from them after that, that had nothing to do with it. They just didn’t want to use me. I got to do a Batman Elseworlds book, and that and Hellblazer were the last things I did for DC. I wasn’t really seeking out work from them once I started doing stuff for Dark Horse. They kept me happy and busy. Out of all the work I did for Vertigo, Hellblazer was the only bad experience. I can’t complain when you consider all the issues I did for Mystery Theater and the one-shots and fill-ins. MM: Your Elseworlds book, Batman: Nevermore, was written by Len Wein. Not 55

Previous Page: One would assume that Guy was chosen to draw this two-part story because of his Baker Street work, but it was just a happy coincidence. Above: Ravenman... or rather an Elseworlds take on Batman. Batman, Hellblazer ™ and ©2010 DC Comics.

being much of a super-hero fan, did you know much about Len’s background? Above: The final page of Batman: Nevermore underwent some changes between the penciling and inking stages. Next Page: Here comes the Judge, here comes the Judge! Guy hasn’t done much work for Marvel, but he had a hand in creating a character for them: The Judge! Deadline #1, page 20. Batman ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Deadline, The Judge ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

GD: No, which makes me sound like a jerk. I didn’t really know who Len Wein was. Once they told me who my writer was, I looked up his credentials, which sounds awful, now knowing what he’s done. No one should have to look him up, but that was a genre I didn’t really read growing up. The story was good, and it was bizarre to draw Edgar Allan Poe fighting crime. I think Jamie Rich might have planted the word in Bob Schreck’s ear that I was looking for work, because I was having a rough time making ends meet. Bob called me up and asked if I wanted to do this, and I said, “Yes! Drawing a Victorian Batman and Edgar Allan Poe sounds like fun.” Bob was great to work with on it, and he made me realized how I was drawing Poe wrong. He said, “You’ve got to draw him like his head is a light bulb. Exaggerate it.” [laughter] He had this huge forehead, but every 56

time I drew him he looked like Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers. I only found two photos for reference, and they both looked the same, but once I started exaggerating the forehead it worked. It was a fun book to draw. I had to draw Batman to where they would think he was a raven, Batman fought a giant orangutan, and there was violence and gore throughout it, so it was different. I was trying my best to get the look of Gotham by Gaslight and failing miserably. Mike still did it the best. MM: Did you work closely with Len or were you just working from the script? GD: I worked with him a little bit when I sent in my first layouts. After that everything was through Bob Schreck. MM: The next year, 2002, you did your first work for Marvel: the Deadline miniseries. How did you get involved with that project?

This Page and Next Page Top: James Sturm’s layouts, Guy’s pencils, and Guy’s inks for Unstable Molecules #1, page 4. Guy followed the layouts fairly closely with this page. He chose to do tighter shots for the panels 1, 2, and 7, which gives the page more contrast, making for a better composition. Next Page Bottom: A family portrait of the not-so-Fantastic Four. Fantastic Four ™ and ©2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.

GD: The writer, Bill Rosemann, contacted me. He was a PR guy at Marvel and was looking to branch out into writing. It was pretty straight-forward. He sent me a script, and I liked it. I did a whole bunch of designs for the Judge that they didn’t use. I made him a little Vertigo-looking. He didn’t have a cape or a medallion or anything. He was just a guy who was kind of misty in a long trenchcoat—my old standby. Joe Quesada came in and said, “Well, let’s go this route,” and he designed the costume for the Judge. It fit into their universe more than anything I was thinking of. Which was fine with me—if he wanted to design it, what was I going to say? He let me design a lot of the villains that weren’t established, and they let me have my way with the two heroes you did get to see. I drew Spider-Man on one page, and it made me realize why I shouldn’t be drawing super-heroes, because it wasn’t very good. Anybody who is an artist can draw something, but if they’re 58

not inspired or they don’t have a love for the character, it’s not going to be their best work, no matter how much effort they put into it. I put a lot into that Spider-Man, but it wasn’t a very good Spider-Man. There was hope that there would be a sequel, but it didn’t materialize. After that is when I got the Fantastic Four gig. MM: And that series—Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules—did get a nice reception. Were you surprised at all because of the nature of the book that it got such a big reaction? GD: Yeah, mainly because I thought it would be too indie for their readership. They brought me on last-minute. It was the same editor I had on Deadline, and he

was great. He would ask me to change this or that, and I’d say, “Okay, I’ll make these changes.” He said, “Now if you don’t agree with me, you can tell me, because I’ll listen.” “No, that’s fine. Spider-Man looks off? Yeah, he does. I’ll change it.” I guess it was because we had an easy work relationship that he brought me to do Unstable Molecules. Originally, Craig Thompson was supposed to be drawing it. The character designs he sent me were beautiful. He should have been doing it, but instead he did Blankets, which was better for him. He sent me his character designs and some of his model sheets, and they were amazing. The guy does such great brushwork. I did a tryout page, and they said yes. I think they were having a problem finding someone to do the job off of James Sturm’s layouts. The layouts were already done, and he knew exactly how he wanted the story to be paced out. I guess people weren’t really excited to just be his hand and finish the drawings off. Really, James should have been drawing it. You could have printed his layouts as a full comic; they were great. It was the only job I did where I worked off of someone else’s layouts. It was kind of like Phil Hester’s revenge. [laughter]

MM: The layouts went back and forth between strict six- and a nine-panel grid structures, which you don’t see very much at Marvel anymore. GD: They harkened back to old comic books. He let me change a couple of things. When I penciled things out I said, “Can I do this?” and he was open to it. It wasn’t like I was asking for drastic changes, it was more, “This fits better in this panel. Can I move this?” I may have changed three panels. And they had a different artist doing the “comic” panels. It was a very easy job. It was all laid out for me. All I did was rule out the paper and fill in the panels, leaving blank panels for the other artist to fill in. 59

Part 5:

Frogs, Zombies, and Other Assorted Pests comfortable with B.P.R.D. the longer I worked on it. I think a lot of it with Dark Waters was that I really did not want to screw up and lose the job and have to go back to drawing other stuff. It was stiff. My Abe was really rough looking. Mike was walking me through a lot of the things I was doing wrong, which was great— things like, “Don’t give Abe two lips. Just show his upper lip.” He sent me a bust of Abe for reference on the markings. I got lots of free stuff for drawing it wrong. [laughter] “I drew it wrong again, Mike. Maybe you should send me some original art.” [laughter] But I did it, and I guess people didn’t hate it. Mike liked it, or at least saw that I could get better at it, because right after that we did Plague of Frogs. Again, that was rough, but near the end I was feeling a little more secure with it. And Mike never tied my hands. He never said, “Okay, this is how I draw Abe, so this is how you have to draw Abe.” He said things like, “Don’t give Abe two lips, because it looks too much like a cartoon fish,” but he wanted me to do it in my style. He didn’t want me to try to be him, which was nice. We worked back and forth designing stuff together, which was great fun. He has an amazing imagination, so I was loving that. I was having a ball. My fiancée, who’s been with me through the fall of Mystery Theater and everything leading up to B.P.R.D., said, “You’re actually having fun. You’re not bitching anymore

MM: Did you try to get more work from Marvel after Unstable Molecules or did you go straight onto B.P.R.D.?

GD: I probably said, “If anything comes up, keep me in mind,” which I say to any editor I work for. I had met Mike Mignola years earlier, and I would talk with him now and then and catch up. I was loving what he was doing with Hellboy. I had told him I was going to be working on Fantastic Four, and he said, “Oh, my God! You’re drawing Fantastic Four? You get to draw the Thing!” “No, I don’t get to draw Thing. I’m drawing them as real people at a grocery store in the ’50s.” He was like, “What? You’re drawing The Marquis with all these weird monsters, and then you have to draw the Fantastic Four as real people?” They weren’t giving me anything that I really wanted to do. I was showing people what I wanted to do in The Marquis, but I wasn’t getting those types of jobs. I wasn’t against doing Fantastic Four. I enjoyed working on the book with James Sturm, but I was still feeling pigeon-holed. I was bitching to Mike about it, and Mike said, “Well, you know, I was thinking of spinning off B.P.R.D. into an ongoing series. You should draw it.” I said, “I would love to draw it!” They were doing a series of single issues, and they gave one to me to make sure it would work and that it was something I really wanted to do. I almost screwed it up, because it was kind of weak. I definitely got more 60

about not getting to draw what you want.” I was happy for the first time, I think, since Mystery Theater. I felt like I was being appreciated for what I was doing. I don’t want it to sound like I was whining, because people were appreciating the work I did— Batman: Nevermore and Unstable Molecules and so on—but there is a kinship in what I like to draw and what Mike likes to draw. MM: But with Dark Waters, you didn’t get to draw any monsters. GD: That’s because it was a different writer, Brian Augustyn. I got to draw Abe and Roger—they’re monsters. Even if it was just them shopping at a supermarket, it would have been fun. Abe at the supermarket... I’d draw that. [laughter] MM: Did you have conversations with Brian or did you just get the script and start drawing? GD: Basically, yeah. I think I e-mailed him once about something, but I never heard back from him for whatever reason, so there was no dialogue. It was all through Mike and Scott Allie. MM: Since this was your first time playing in Mike’s sandbox, did you have to submit layouts and pencils as you were drawing them to make sure you were staying on target with what they were expecting from you? GD: No. I mean, I sent them the layouts and they approved those before I penciled the whole book, but I didn’t have to send them a page or two every couple days for approval. Just the big steps: all the layouts, then all the pencils, and then I made any changes they wanted before I went to inks. I think the cover was the one thing I had to make a lot of changes on, and that was just because it was the first image I drew. They needed it for solicitation, and I was trying to nail Abe down. MM: Around the time you were starting to work on B.P.R.D., you also did a serial for Métal Hurlant: “The Zombies That Ate the World.” How did you get involved with them? GD: That came about from Dave Stewart. He was coloring me on B.P.R.D. and was

doing some stuff for Métal Hurlant. They wanted to do this zombie short story, and Dave said to them, “Why don’t you use Guy Davis?” I was contacted by their editor on the American side of Humanoids, and I loved so many of the European books, so I was like, “Wow! Les Humanoïdes Associés!” They sent me the script and I started doing designs and layouts. And the script was great; Jerry Frissen has a hilarious and sick imagination. Great character pacing, too. I got a little more cartoony with it, especially as it went along. At first they wanted me to treat it very realistically. I didn’t think it worked that way, because it was a dark comedy. If you played it too straight, people wouldn’t get that it was 61

Previous Page: A recent illustration of Abe Sapien. Above: This cover image was done for Humanoïdes for foreign editions of The Zombies That Ate the World. Abe Sapien ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola. The Zombies That Ate the World and all related characters are ™ and ©2010 Humanoids.

comical; it would end up being too dry. I said, “We’ve got to make it more like a cartoon,” and they were fine with that. They were really encouraging, too, which was nice, because I had learned a lot from European comics. They were happy with me having lots of panels on a page. They were happy with the scratchy style, and the colorist, Charlie Kirchoff, worked out really well on my style, too. Originally, I thought my line work should be cleaner, and I was trying for a cleaner look. MM: It does have a look somewhere between the linge claire style and your usual work. GD: I was really trying to be clear, but it’s hard because I have a shaky hand. I was going over it a lot, and it was becoming too stiff. They said, “No, no, we liked it when it was rougher.” I think I was trying to be cleaner because I was looking at what was in Métal Hurlant at the time. I was thinking they were wanting something more like Tardi or Moebius, but they wanted me to do my own thing. So I stopped trying for the clean line and let it grow from there, and I got more exaggerated as I went. After the first short I did, they said, “Why don’t you do the cover for the issue?” I went, “Oh, my God! I get to do a cover for Métal Hurlant? Yay!” And then they wanted to do it as a serial. I was having a great time. It was like B.P.R.D.—I was getting to do what I wanted to do. MM: Did you do a lot of sketching to get the style to where you wanted it to be or were you drawing from the top of your head?

GD: I was drawing it and learning as I went. There was never enough time for me to do samples like I normally would. I did character designs for the main characters and just started penciling it. As I was drawing each chapter I would take what I hated from the previous chapter and do those things differently. The one thing that really helped me loosen up is that, while I was working on “Zombies,” I did two other things for Humanoids. 63

Previous Page: The Belgian finally wins Maggie’s affections. Above: Belgians gone wild! Cover art for The Zombies That Ate the World. The Zombies That Ate the World and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Humanoids.

Above and Right: In 2002, Humanoids relaunched Métal Hurlant as a 64-page anthology comic book series featuring many writers and artists from the US. With “The Photo Taker” from issue #9, Guy took Jacques Tardi’s cover and turned it into a 10-page story. Shown are pages 6 and 10. Next Page: A page from a Lucien story drawn by Guy which has only been published in French.

One was “The Photo Taker,” which was a short story I wrote and drew. They had this Tardi drawing they were going to use as a cover, and they asked me, “Do you want to do a story based on this cover?” Tardi is a huge influence on me, and I was nervous as hell. But they liked my pitch, and I tried to do my version of his characters and incorporate everything from his drawing. Then I also did a short story—which was never printed in English—for a series called Lucien, which is a very cartoony series—big noses and stuff. I was trying to mimic the regular artist [Margerin]’s style mostly, and I think looking at his rubbery style and before that trying to fuse Tardi’s style with my own, as far as how he used blacks, really helped me loosen up and get more cartoony. That 64

also played a lot into what I was doing in B.P.R.D., particularly with Johann, who has a more rubbery look. MM: Besides Johann, is there anything you were able to take from what you learned doing the Humanoids work that you were able to apply to your regular work? GD: I think so. As I went along I got looser, at least with the acting and movement of the characters—especially with Johann, but with other things, too. It may not look cartoony. MM: I think you have become even more expressive than you were. Would you like to do more work in that cartoony style? GD: Yeah, I would definitely enjoy that. I’ve done some pin-ups for people in that

sort of cartoony style, and there’s an idea I have for a book I want to do after The Marquis that’s more in that style. It’s fun—a different type of fun.

MM: Why was B.P.R.D. set up as a series of mini-series rather than as a monthly ongoing title? Was it to match Hellboy’s format?

MM: Did you start in on Plague of Frogs right after Dark Waters or was there a gap?

GD: I don’t know. I think they just wanted each story to be pretty self-contained. They all tie together, but you can pick up any of them and get enough of a recap to follow the story. Some people complained about the numbering, but since each one is its own story I always thought it made sense to do it that way.

GD: If there was a gap, it was only a couple of months before I started getting stuff from Mike for Plague of Frogs. He wrote that one all himself before John Arcudi was brought in. He wrote it all longhand and then faxed it to me. Some pages would have his layouts for certain things he saw in a specific way.

MM: What kind of response did you get? Mike has a pretty loyal following, and this was the first time a big project set in the Hellboy universe wasn’t drawn by him. Was there an adverse reaction to you being there or was it generally positive? GD: Oh, yeah, there was an adverse reaction. People wanted Mike to draw it. I wanted Mike to draw it. People didn’t understand that me drawing it wasn’t keeping Mike from drawing it. If he wanted to draw B.P.R.D., I’d be back drawing the Fantastic Four at the supermarket. He just wanted to focus on other things. He just wanted to write it and be involved that way. People wanted either Mike doing it or at least someone who reminded them of Mike, like Ryan Sook’s Hollow Earth, which was beautiful. He had a Mike vibe going on with the art, and I think that was an easier mix for the fans to accept. MM: Kind of like Duncan Fregredo is now drawing Hellboy. GD: Right. He’s not Mike—he does his own thing—but he has enough of Mike’s sensibilities. Now I’m using more solid blacks and shadows than I ever did before, just from working on B.P.R.D. and poring over Mike’s work—not that Mike actually asked for me to do that. It just evolved from me working on the series. But in the beginning, my older style was definitely different from Mike’s, so people weren’t really digging it at first. But Mike liked it, and that’s who I was trying to please. And Dark Horse liked it. As long as they were happy, 66

I didn’t mind taking the lumps from everybody else. And that’s not to say that everybody hated it, but there was a lot more negative reaction in the beginning. I think I wore them down, and they soon realized they didn’t have a choice. [laughter] “I don’t like Guy Davis on it, but he’s not going anywhere and I want to read the story.” [laughter] And I heard from people as the series progressed who said things like, “Wow, I really hated your stuff, but I just didn’t understand it. Now I really love it, and I’m glad you’re drawing the book,” which was always nice to hear. I don’t hear, “Boy, I hated your stuff in the beginning, and I still hate your stuff,” but I’m sure there are a couple of them out there. [laughter] Mike was always encouraging me to just draw it my way. Early on, I remember reading comments online somewhere about how the way I was drawing Johann was different from Mike’s version. They called my version “the lightbulb Johann,” because his head looked like a lightbulb. Later on, I talked to Mike about how I drew the fingers differently. It wasn’t a conscious effort to be different from Mike, it’s just how I interpret his style. People didn’t like Lightbulb Johann, but as the series progressed people stopped complaining about it. And I think it was when Mike did a cover for The Universal Machine with Johann, they were complaining about how Mike drew Johann, because it didn’t match my Johann, which was embarrassing, because his Johann is the model. [laughter] They had gotten so used to seeing Lightbulb Johann, they assumed it was the correct way to draw him and Mike had changed how he did it. It was ridiculous, but it’s a funny story.

MM: Given that Johann has no facial features, you have to put a lot into his body language to get his mood across. Does that present any extra challenge to you as an artist? GD: I don’t remember having any problems with Johann at all. You have to make it very exaggerated—it’s over-acting—to have it come across. But it’s hard to make anything subtle come across in comics. You have to make it more animated with hand gestures and things like that, and Johann was the same way. It’s in the tilt of the head and having his rubbery arms in motion. I found him really easy mainly because he didn’t have a face. When deadlines are tight, I’m hoping for a lot of Johann pages. [laughter] MM: What was the thinking behind the cover concept for B.P.R.D.? Up until recently there would be one big image with a narrow strip across the bottom with a second image. Was that your idea or something Mike came up with? GD: Oh, no. That was Mike’s. He has such an amazing design sense. For the covers, I would do sketches and then send them to Mike. There were a few versions of the cover for the first issue of Plague of Frogs where I was trying to do something like Mike would do—a group with something graphic behind them—and it just wasn’t working. The first version was the group with a monster behind them, and it was just awful. Mike wanted me to do something that was different than his usual Hellboy designs. He said, “Do the scene where Johann is freaking out over the body, with an inset panel.” 67

Previous Page: The mission gets off to a rather bad start. B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs #2, page 12. Above: Given that Johann has a “lightbulb head” with no facial features, Guy has to exaggerate Johann’s poses and gestures to convey his mood and intent. The hands are particularly important for this, and Guy employs a cartoonier approach with Johann for just that reason. B.P.R.D. and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

Below: The two-panel cover format helped B.P.R.D. stand out on the shelf. Cover art for B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs #5. Next Page: Cover art for B.P.R.D.: The Dead #5.

Things like that happened with later covers, too. The cover of Plague of Frogs #5, where Abe has the spear sticking out of him, originally was just Abe floating in dead space shown from above. In the thumbnail sketch it looked fine, but when I penciled it, Mike said, “It looks like he was hit by a truck. It’s not really dramatic,” so we tackled it from a different angle. Mike usually has just the right idea of how to tackle it and make it an appealing image. MM: You hadn’t really done that many covers, outside of your creator-owned work, up to that point. GD: They never let me. I wanted to do covers for Mystery Theater. I told Karen, “If I’m not doing the covers, let’s do them in the style of the period.” I was hoping for Sandman Mystery Theater that they would do pulp-style covers or homages to films of that time or covers in the style of Tamera Lempicka or other artists of that time, but they went with the photographs. They were fine, but I was never a big fan of that. I didn’t get to draw covers for Aliens or Terminator. I did get to

do covers for Nevermen, but outside of Baker Street and The Marquis, that was about it. MM: Did you look at it as a challenge, as a way of saying, “See. I can do covers, too”? GD: No. I didn’t ask to do the covers; they offered. From the beginning they said, “This is going to be your book, so you do the covers.” It wasn’t anything I was expecting to do, and later on, when Mike wanted to do the covers, he called and said, “Is it a problem? Can I do the covers on B.P.R.D.?” I was like, “You’re asking me? I would love for you to do the covers. I would love to see you draw some of the things I get to draw.” It was never a problem. I was really happy. Mike’s one of the nicest guys. He thought I would be insulted if he took over the covers, so they were thinking of doing variant covers. I always hated that crap, because to me it just seems like you’re trying to milk sales. Besides, Mike’s covers would sell more than mine anyway. [laughter] I wouldn’t even want to know the numbers on a variant over, how many his and how many mine. So I said, “No, just do it. That’s fine. I’m not insulted at all.” When Mike started doing the covers, it was inspiring. With the Black Flame, I had designed the costume, but when Mike did the cover with the portrait of the Black Flame, where he worked out all that gear work on his chest, it was like, “There you go. Here’s my reference.” It was helpful and inspiring. MM: Almost half of the last issue of Plague of Frogs is without captions or dialogue. Does that put any extra pressure on you as the artist? GD: No, I didn’t feel that way. I love doing things without words, and I had done a few things before that time that were silent. I’ve always liked the idea of doing wordless comics, probably from watching a lot of silent movies growing up and Fantasia. Obviously, it’s more of a challenge to get certain points across, but that last issue was so bizarre. I remember Mike saying we were going to treat it like our ending of 2001, where all this bizarre imagery takes place, even

though there is a narrative of Abe moving throughout his Victorian past. I got to design the submarine and the Victorian diving suit—although, the diving suit was based on a real Victorian diving suit. It looked bizarre and great, so I had to throw it in. MM: The next series, The Dead, introduced a new cast member: Benjamin Daimio. Did you design him? GD: Yes. I mean, I did the design with everybody’s input. There was a huge back and forth with the design—probably more than there should have been. Because he was a major cast member, they wanted to make sure it was right. My worry was that it would end up looking too much like Jonah Hex. I wanted to make sure it was different, and I sketched out different ideas that were pretty gross. When you’re missing half your mouth, you’re going to be drooling, and if you smile wide, it’s going to look really grotesque when that mouth splits open. I was over-thinking it, and we finally got it down to a nice, simplified scar that makes him recognizable. You never see it working like it probably should actually work. One of the things we did to make sure it didn’t look like Jonah Hex was to get rid of any connecting skin so that it was just a huge gash. MM: When John Arcudi came on as cowriter, did that change the process of how you worked? Were there any extra steps for you?

GD: He and Mike would work out all of that stuff before I saw anything. I’d known John for a few years, and we got along great. He had been trying to find something we could work on together at Marvel or DC. If he had a project come up that he thought I’d work out on, he’d put my name in with the editor, but it never panned out to a job. So it was great that Mike brought him in, because we finally got to work together. Instead of Mike’s handwritten scripts, I got tighter scripts from John with dialogue. Beforehand, they would talk over what they were going to do and what would be coming up. Then I’d get a call from Mike or John or both, and they’d say, “You’re going to need to design this thing that’s coming up, and this is the story.” Then the script would come, and I 70

would lay it out. It was another pair of eyes going over pages and designs, but it was never a problem. MM: Did Mike continue to send you layouts on occasion? GD: If Mike has something really set in his mind—for example, in Universal Machine Mike and I were designing stuff, and I worked out a spread. He said, “We’ll do the spread this way, because then you can show more.” He only does layouts like that few and far between. I think that was the last one he actually laid out that way. We have a great collaboration. It helps that we all knew each other and were friends beforehand. There’s that respect for each other’s work, so there’s no stepping on toes or anything. If something doesn’t work, I redraw it, because I want it to be the best that it can be.

MM: The action really picks up in The Black Flame, and I think your art evolves a bit to match the intensity. Your art seems to become a bit more kinetic. Was that a conscious change to match the feel of the script or was it just you becoming more comfortable drawing the book? GD: Probably a little bit of both. I was probably feeling more secure that after three or four series I wasn’t going to kill it. And I was feeling more comfortable with the characters. I didn’t have to think, “Am I drawing Abe’s markings right?” I’m sure that helped. It was around Garden of Souls that I really felt comfortable. I was enjoying myself, and I’m sure that energy comes out.

MM: In The Black Flame, Roger’s body language changes as he starts to emulate Daimio. How much conscious effort do you put into each character’s body language and trying to make them distinct from each other? GD: It’s something that I don’t really think about; it just comes out the more I get to know the characters. As the stories go along, I’m sure you’ll see each of them act a certain way. It’s just a matter of, “Okay, if Roger’s going to be in this scene, this is how he would stand and how he would act.” I don’t sit down and make notes on scripts or anything, I just draw the characters in the manner I think they would express themselves after reading the script. In The Black Flame, when Roger starts emulating Daimio as far as smoking and things like that, that was in the script. MM: Abe goes through a lot of changes in the course of the series. At the beginning of the series he loses his confidence and mopes around, but after Roger dies and Liz is kidnapped he becomes much more aggressive and fills Daimio’s role. GD: It’s all based on John’s script. When he says, “This is how Abe is acting,” I change his body language to fit the script. John’s scripts are very thorough, so it’s a matter of trying to capture how he wants the characters to come across. 71

Previous Page: The jaguar god in its guise as a nun attacks Daimio, leaving him scarred in more way than one. B.P.R.D.: Universal Machine #2, page 18. Also shown is Guy’s design sketch for the jaguar god’s nun form. Below: The bond between Daimio and Roger continues to grow. B.P.R.D.: The Black Flame #2, page 16. B.P.R.D. and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

Also, around the time of The Dead, I started using a different lead. I started using a B lead a lot more, which is a softer lead, and it really let me pencil more fluidly. I was already penciling looser by that time, and that probably helped me to open up, too. I didn’t have to have a tight line for Abe’s shape anymore, because I knew when I inked it what his shape was going to be.

glasses. I don’t think they sold at all. I’d even forgotten about them until you mentioned them. It was a fun thing to do on the side, but it didn’t take off at all. Mike liked them, and I think Scott asked him if he’d be cool with us doing an ad in the back with all the characters toasting. All the toasts are lines from old movies. Johann’s line is Rico’s from the ending of Little Caesar, but in German. Way back when we started B.P.R.D., I never asked Mike to use any of his influence except when I asked him, “Can you make them put the ads in the back of the book?” I hate when you look through a DC book and every two pages there’s an ad. It pulls you out of the story. And Dark Horse went for it. So the Thugshots ad was supposed to be in the back of the book not the middle. It was not my decision not to have it in back, because I would never screw with the story. The story is the most important thing, but somewhere along the line Dark Horse thought it would be good to throw it in the middle of the book. When it came in the mail, I was just mortified. One, I didn’t want Mike to think I had asked them to do it. “Mike, can you ask them to put all the ads in the back of the book, except mine? I want mine right in the middle.” [laughter] I called him up and said, “I hate this, and I

MM: Tell me about Thugshots. There was a funny one-page ad in the middle of the issue with all of the B.P.R.D. characters. The first time I saw the ad, I just turned the page and started reading the ad. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t part of the story. GD: That was a screw-up. It was just something I scribbled around with one day because I love old movie characters, especially the character actors and the thugs. They have the most interesting faces. One day I drew a bunch of these characters in my sketchbook, and I thought, “Thugshots,” instead of mugshots. “I could put these on shot glasses.” I was at a convention with Mike, John, and Scott, and I showed them the sketches. I asked Scott, “Do you think this is something you guys might want to do at Dark Horse?” He said, “I’ll pass it along, and we’ll see.” They actually liked the idea enough to make them into shot

did not ask for this. If you’re going to yell at anybody, don’t yell at me.” He didn’t like it, but he understood it was a mistake. MM: There was a lot going on in The Universal Machine. It goes back and forth between two main plots, one being a Predator-like story of a group of soldiers getting picked off one by one in a jungle by some unseen monster, the other set in a gothic castle complete with vampires, werewolves and devils. Then Hellboy shows up with the Wendigo. Does that make it more interesting for you? Does it make it more complicated for you? GD: What made it more interesting was that every storyline was different from the last. Each one had a different tone, a different feel, which is great. It’s like the first three Alien movies, not counting the crappy fourth movie. Each one was entertaining with its own different type of mood. So Universal Machine was great in that it had all these flashbacks and these other stories mixed in. I

got to draw the Wendigo, a flashback with Abe and Hellboy, young Liz and her nightmares, and Daimio getting his face torn out. And it was more like the older B.P.R.D. in that it was spookier. It wasn’t them fighting the frogs as much as it was the Marquis de Fabre and his library with Kate and his court of vampires. It was entertaining to do something that was so different. MM: I assume you had to do more design work for this storyline than usual. GD: It wasn’t the one I had to do the most design work for—that was Garden of Souls— but this one had a lot. Some things were already established. From Hollow Earth I knew how young Liz looked. I did design Daryl— the Wendigo—and the villain’s castle and the devils and vampires. A lot of the clutter in the background of the castle I just made up along the way in the pencils, so there wasn’t much to do there. That was the first appearance of Agent Devon, too, so there was him. Most of the stories have a pretty good 73

Previous Page: Original art for the Thugshots ad, complete with a Hellboy panel drawn by Mike Mignola, along with the four Thug designs. Yeah, see? Above: Kate encounters a bit more than expected at the manor of the Marquis de Fabre. Pages 11 and 12 of B.P.R.D.: Universal Machine #5. Thugshots ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis. B.P.R.D. and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

amount of design work that goes into them. One of the stories that didn’t have a lot of design work to it was The Black Goddess, just because everything had been designed for The Warning. When it came down to filling up the sketchbook section of the collection I was like, “I’ve got nothing.” We had already designed it all and put it in the last sketchbook. But all the design work, that’s some of the most fun to do work. Everybody oversees it and chimes in, but it’s mostly me and Mike going back and forth on stuff. MM: Typically, how long do you spend working on designs before you start doing layouts? GD: It depends on the designs and how easy it goes. They’ll usually give me a heads-up on things I’ll have to design. I was doing designs for The Black Flame while I was working on The Dead. They said, “We’re going to have this character called the Black Flame. Design him up.”

That was a day’s work. But when Garden of Souls came up, that was three or four days of going back and forth over the cyborg villains until Mike faxed me these shapes that were just perfect for them. So on average I may spend a week doing designs for a series. And that’s not spending every moment of the day working on it, but also doing layouts and things. It varies, too. Some things click, and some things don’t click at all and need more work. To me, that’s the fun. Sometimes I’ll design something and say, “Brilliant! This will be great!” Then I’ll send it to Mike and he’ll send back this sketch of what he has in mind, and then I’ll look at my design and go, “My stuff sucks! Why didn’t I think of this?” MM: You mentioned the villains’ mechanical suits in Garden of Souls, and they did look like Mike designed them. 74

GD: In the script they were described as iron lungs with legs, which sounds cool but really wasn’t interesting at all when you saw the first designs I did. Then we started thinking of them using the diving suits that we saw in Plague of Frogs, except that they had modified them to walk around in the jungle, which was a neat idea. Mike really wanted them to have a different shape— not human-shaped—where their arms would be too far forward or too far back, and the old men would be like chicken fetuses floating inside these things with wires hooked to their brains. That was just brilliant. I loved those guys. I just dressed them up by putting rivets and a bunch of tubing all over them. After that we spent a long time designing all the creatures.

stylized, but I basically took the look from that picture. We didn’t want to make her really grotesque and have peeled back lips or anything. MM: With Killing Ground, were you using a brush more than usual? I’m thinking particularly of an early scene where Chavez hijacks a car on his way to B.P.R.D. headquarters. GD: I tried using more brush with Universal Machine for the jungle scenes. I love the way brush looks, I just don’t have a steady enough hand for it. I was probably playing with the brush more in places where I didn’t have to worry about as fine a line. So I was using more brush in Killing Ground, just

MM: There was a definite Island of Dr. Moreau vibe going on. GD: We designed so much that a lot of it never even saw the light of day. There were tons of these little critters, these little monkeys with parakeet heads that were supposed to be running around the mansion, but it was so cluttered as it was you wouldn’t have even noticed them. I originally drew Edward, the fleshy one, basically as just a buff guy—a Robert Shaw type. John was like, “Make him bigger. Make him really muscular.” Around this time I was working on “Zombies That Ate the World,” and I drew this body shape that was kind of like a cartoon bulldog. He had smaller legs and his upper torso was really grotesque. That seemed to work. It was more interesting than just having a buff guy walking around. MM: Panya is an interesting character, but there’s only so much you can do with her visually since she’s lying still in bed all the time. Was it difficult to make her scenes visually interesting? GD: She had to be interesting to look at from the get-go. Originally she was male, but John wanted to have another female character on the team. That was easy enough. Instead of being bald, we gave her hair. [laughter] It was the same face she had when she was a guy. I have books on mummies and you can find lots of reference online. There was a shot of a mummy that had those eyes and that nose. It’s very 75

Previous Page: Designs for B.P.R.D.: The Black Flame. Below: Mike Mignola designed the basic shapes of the robotic bodies of Abe’s former associates and Guy spiffed them up. B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls #5, page 12.

as addition to the detail. When I ink Panya, I ink her normally, but I put in some harsh lines. A lot of the finer lines around her mouth are brush. I can do that. If they said, “Why don’t you ink Liz’s face with a brush?” I’d be like, “No, no, no.” I couldn’t do that. I don’t have the hand for it. But I love the way brush looks when other artists do it right. [laughter] It’s something I only use for certain things, like rocks and trees and mummies’ faces. [laughter] MM: It seemed like you had a lot of fun drawing Johann in Edward’s body. GD: Oh, yeah, that was great. MM: Were you drawing on your experience drawing “Zombies” as far as his facial expressions and acting was concerned? GD: A little bit. It was a little more exaggerated. When they told me Johann was going to get this new body, I thought, “Great! I’m going to keep Johann acting the way he always acts, but in this new body.” I wanted him to keep Johann’s mannerisms so he’d still be doing those weird, upturned gestures with his hands and tilting his head. It was drawing the body language as Lightbulb Johann, but in a human body, which gave him a lot of character over Edward, who was more stoic and aggressive. MM: Do you get involved in the plotting at all? Do you know what’s coming up and where the series is heading? GD: Yeah, I know what’s coming up. I don’t get involved as far as saying, “Well this is what I think you should do.” Everything they have planned is great as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing for me to interject; it all sounds wonderful and fun. They usually tell me things two or three series ahead of what I’m working on. I knew Roger was going to die early on. They had that planned out by the beginning of The Dead. MM: When you actually sit down to pencil, will the drawings sometimes make you think of different ideas for the series? GD: Not so much when I’m penciling. When I’m starting to lay things out I might think of something. Like in Black Goddess

we had this scene where the frogs’ tongues bloated out and became dragons that fought for Memnan Saa. Originally, that was just smoke that was coming out of their mouths. The frogs were supposed to cough out smoke and the smoke would become the magical dragons. I wanted to do something more horrific and biological. I said, “Let’s make the frogs’ tongues, which are these long things anyway, bloat out of their mouths and turn into the dragons, turning the frogs inside-out.” My contributions are more concerned with the imagery than with story direction. MM: With War on Frogs #1 you inked Herb Trimpe. Were you familiar with his work? 77

Previous Page: Guy pulled out the brush a bit more than usual for this page from B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls #5, as the hulking Edward searches for Abe. Above: Johann enjoys his new body. Notice how he still makes broad gestures with his hands. B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground #1, page 13. B.P.R.D. and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

Below: Saint Nick beats Slick Nick every time. Page 5 of the wonderful “The Christmas Spirit.” Next Page: Page 3 of “The Marquis and the Coachman” for MySpace Dark Horse Presents #22, along with Guy’s design sketches for the devil known as the Coachman.

GD: No. John is a huge comics fan—and Mike is, too. They both love a lot of the older artists, and John really wanted to work with Herb Trimpe and John Severin, who did the second issue. Herb was supposed to ink it himself, but for some reason that didn’t work out. Everybody else involved thought that finding a new person to ink Herb might make it hard to keep it on model. They said, “Here, do a page.” I wanted to help out, so I tried it. I’m sure I did more than I should have, as far as adding stuff, but his pencils were very loose. They were a lot like mine in that he blocked in shapes and left a lot of things out. A lot of things, like the

B.P.R.D. headquarters, weren’t on model. Some things I had to redraw. Some things I had to throw in. People who love Herb Trimpe probably hated that I changed so much. They were probably thinking it would look like his older work. I could sort of see some of the linework that he wanted to do, and I tried to put some of that into it, but a lot of it was me trying to fill in the blanks and get the frogs back on model. But he liked it as far as I know. They said he had no problem with it. It was a weird situation, because it was the only time I’ve been just an inker. There were some things nobody noticed until I started inking. He put a block over Roger’s ass, too. Roger usually has a bare ass and the block only covers the front. Herb had put the block in front and in back. Maybe he didn’t know that it doesn’t go all the way around, but I had to take all those out, which made for a lot of butt shots in the book. You get shots looking between Roger’s legs at the frog monsters with his big, old, now naked ass taking up the top of the panel. [laughter] MM: You did a story for Dark Horse’s MySpace page that tied into the story, too. GD: That was to let people know that B.P.R.D.—and I—were still around during a break for B.P.R.D.: 1946. We did the last two parts of the story, which they wanted to use as a framing sequence for the War on Frogs trade paperback. I actually just finished the first part of that, which I had penciled a couple of years ago, because they’re finally getting the War on Frogs collection ready. It was weird going back to ink the first part of a story I had already finished the last two parts of. It’s coming out in 2010 sometime. MM: You also drew another story for MySpace Dark Horse Presents called “The Christmas Spirit,” which Mike wrote. GD: That was pure fun to do. I got to draw Saint Nicholas and a different type of devil. And then I did the “Marquis and the Coachman” story on MySpace before Inferno came out. That was hard just from the standpoint that their deal with MySpace says they have to have some color in every story. With The Marquis, it’s a black-&-white world unless he’s in Hell, so I had to figure

out how to involve color into this story. Then I thought of the Coachman as a devil who has all these other devils inside him keeping him warm. That’s why he glows red. Then when they escape into other people’s bodies, that fades out. It was just luck that I was able to figure out something that somewhat made sense of why there was color in a Marquis story. MM: That’s interesting in and of itself that you had to use color as your starting point for coming up with that story. GD: Yeah. It was not just trying to think of a story as an introduction to give new readers an idea of what The Marquis is about, it was based around the fact that it had to have red on each page. Also, if we did it as a standalone story in color, people would be confused why the actual book isn’t in color. That was a challenge for a couple of days. Thankfully, when it’s your own creation, you can make up your own rules. “Actually, when the devils arrive fresh, they’re still warm, so they’re still red.” You’ll never see it again. 79

This Page: Pencils and inks for page 2 of “Solomon Kane: All the Damned Souls at Sea” for MySpace Dark Horse Presents #27. Next Page: Godzilla’s got nothing on this guy. Luckily for our heroes, Johann is in control of this behemoth.

I just did a two-part Solomon Kane story that’s on Dark Horse Presents now. MM: I assume you’re a fan of Robert E. Howard? GD: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t read everything he’s done. I’ve probably read more Burroughs than Howard, but I like the character of Solomon Kane. It was fun to actually draw Solomon Kane himself, because I had done some monster designs for the regular series, that Mario Guevara got to draw.

MM: With The Warning there was a Godzilla/kaiju/mass destruction feel to the story. That had to be fun to draw. GD: Oh, yeah. It was great having those giant robots come out and tear up the place. MM: You had to draw a lot of rubble, too. GD: It’s a lot easier to draw rubble when deadlines hit. [laughter] And I get to play with the brush more, because it doesn’t have to be straight. I love Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. He draws the best destroyed buildings in the world. I don’t have the patience for that. Going into it I was thinking, “Oh, boy! I get to do Akira-type destruction!” Then when it comes down to it, it’s like, “No, it’s brushwork destruction, I’m afraid.” I don’t have the patience to draw every level of a building that’s been destroyed. MM: Well, he probably had a lot of assistants helping him. GD: That’s a good excuse. [laughter] 80

MM: You left the ghosts in issue #5 as raw pencil drawings. Was that your idea or was that part of the script? GD: That wasn’t in the script. It was just something to give them a different feel. There are different types of ghosts in B.P.R.D. There are the ones in Killing Ground that Johann speaks to that are sort of shapes in the dark. Then there are the spirits of the dead scientists in The Dead, which are blue and kind of glow. For this one it needed to be more somber. We couldn’t have the dark shapes, because they were outside in the daylight, and I thought glowing, blue people would look too Ghostbuster-ish. I tried keeping it more shadowy and misty, and that was a way of indicating it more for Dave, too, to color it softer. MM: Do you work with Dave closely? Do you provide him with color notes for everything or just in certain circumstances? GD: I give him color notes for everything, especially when I’m doing things like those brush jungles. “This is a person’s leg, and this is a branch”—things like that, where I put too much clutter in. He’s amazing. I can throw all this clutter in, and he gets 98% of it. He does a wonderful job. I was never happy with my work in color—I hated the idea of it— until he started coloring me in B.P.R.D. Before Plague of Frogs and even Dark Waters, I assumed he was going to color it like he did Mike’s stuff, but he sent in the colors saying, “I wanted to try something different.” He had this textured brush look that was just perfect for my linework. My linework is not clean, and before Dave, everybody who’d color me would just do a standard house style. They wouldn’t adapt for each artist, and that’s what makes Dave so amazing is that he adapts his style for the art as opposed to trying to shoehorn one style of coloring—which a lot of colorists do—into every artist’s style. That let me open up more, too, as the series progressed. I can trust Dave to know what he’s

doing and to do a wonderful job. I can leave a lot more open for him. I give him rough notes, and my notes are ridiculous. “This is a rock, this is a cloud, and this is a tree. Maybe this girl has red hair and maybe this outfit is blue.” Then I look over everything, because my art gets so cluttered that certain things might cross over. Sometimes I’ll still miss things and see them in print, but no one catches it. People read comics so fast these days, they don’t notice things like that. At least, they don’t write in. “You miscolored Lightbulb Johann.” [laughter] 81

MM: With Black Goddess you got to draw Lobster Johnson. Being a fan of the old pulp heroes and radio shows, I imagine that had to be a treat for you. Obviously, he was already designed, but was there anything you did to make him your own?

MM: What exactly did you do for Lobster Johnson: Iron Prometheus, designwise?

GD: Yeah, but that was all window dressing. It’s the same type of storytelling, but instead of futuristic B.P.R.D. outfits, I’m drawing medieval clothing. I like the genre, and it was fun getting to draw Koschei and Baba Yaga. Mike told me not to get Marquis-like with Baba Yaga’s breasts. I couldn’t draw gnarled, wizened nipples on her like I would for something on The Marquis. Otherwise, it was great getting to draw the dragon. I was designing the dragons for Black Goddess at the same time I was drawing the dragon devil for the Koschei story, so I got to do two different takes on a dragon design. One was a fantasy dragon, and the others I was trying to treat more biologically.

GD: I designed his headquarters. Some things I designed didn’t make it in, like the look of Memnan Saa during that time-period. I designed the giant submarine for the conclusion and a lot of the props, too.

MM: Something we skipped over was that in 2006 you did a short story for The Goon: Noir. Did you have to do much preparatory work to get the feel of Eric Powell’s characters?

MM: You drew some back-up stories for Hellboy: The Wild Hunt. Those were more fantasy/folk tale in nature. Did you have to get into a different mindset to work in a slightly different genre?

GD: No, because it was all already designed ahead of time, except for maybe a couple of side characters that I sketched out in an afternoon. And I had done a pin-up for The Goon years earlier, and I’ve had a couple of people over the years ask me for Goon commissions, so I had

GD: Not really. I drew him in my style, but it was all based on Mike’s model and his characterization. It was just pure fun to draw him while I could. And I got to do some designs for the Lobster Johnson: Iron Prometheus mini-series, so I got to play around some with the setting of his world and that time period.

Previous Page: As a special feature for the B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess tpb, Guy waxed poetic about The Masked Claw— a serial made from recut and dubbed Mexican Lobster Johnson movies. But perhaps he was just making it all up. Left: In this panel from the Hellboy back-up tale, “How Koshchei Became Deathless,” Guy drew a slightly more fanciful dragon than those he drew in B.P.R.D. Below: Guy shows his love for Goya’s Saturn, with Daryl the Wendigo in the role of Saturn, in this panel from B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground #2. B.P.R.D., Lobster Johnson and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

done warm-ups for those. It was a black-&-white book, and I did the grays digitally, like I did with the Usagi Yojimbo short story just before that. The Goon is such a great character, and Thomas Lennon had a really fun script for me. I had too much fun, because I wanted to draw a lot of different things from the series and cram them all into the eight pages that I had to work with. That’s why the Usagi short was so much fun, too. I used all that two-page spread to draw as many of Stan’s cool characters as I could fit in. MM: You also did an issue of Rex Mundi. Were you a fan of the series? How did you get involved with it? GD: I did a pin-up for them years ago, before they were at Dark Horse. I liked the idea, and I kept in touch with Arvid Nelson. When they moved to Dark Horse they were doing a fill-in issue with two short stories, one with Brother Matthew and one with an ancestor of the Duke of Lorraine. I drew the cover based on the Brother Matthew story, but I actually drew the historical story inside. It was fun, again, just to draw a few pages of something different and unique. Just by chance the story was based on Goya’s painting of Saturn swallowing his son. That’s one of my favorite paintings, and I have a huge, door-sized reproduction of it in my hallway. When I got the story I was like, “How did he know I love that painting?” 83

Part 6:

Storytelling and the Creative Process

MM: How do you generally start your day? I know you’re a night owl.

house I just kept those hours. It works out, because the people I deal with at Dark Horse are three hours behind me, so when I get up at noon, they’re just getting to the office at 9:00 in the morning.

GD: People always say, “What time do you get up? You freaking bum!” I get up around noon or 1:00 p.m., depending on how late I went to bed the night before— which is usually somewhere between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning. That was a habit I got in back when I was living in an apartment, because it was always quieter in the middle of the night. Then when we bought the

MM: How does that work out with your fiancée? Do you get to see each other? GD: Oh, yeah, my fiancée, Rosemary Van Deuren, is aspiring to be a writer—she wrote her first book last year in fact—so she works out of the house, too. We keep the same hours. Once I’m up and I’ve had my coffee, I’ll check the e-mails to make sure there aren’t any emergencies. Then I’ll take care of the website and Facebook and Twitter—promotional stuff for The Marquis or whatever else I’m working on. I’m trying to get more of a presence out there. In the old days, if you didn’t have a book on the stands people forgot about you. Nowadays, it seems if they don’t read something about you online... out of sight out of mind. I started a blog to promote The Marquis, so I’ll try to add something to that and respond to any comments. Then I’ll take care of the day-to-day things around the house until around 5:00. That’s when I usually get settled in to draw for the rest of the night. I’ll stop to eat or look at books or check things online, but mostly I’m working from then until I stop for the night. I do that seven days a week until the deadlines are met unless something comes up. MM: Given that you’re working during prime-time viewing hours, I assume you don’t watch much TV. GD: No. I don’t have cable, and now I don’t have broadcast TV. I 84

don’t have a TV in the studio. I never liked that. I listen to old-time radio shows or music while I work, which I enjoy more anyway. We have a DVD player, and when we eat dinner we’ll put something on, but I watch maybe two hours of TV a day at most—usually less. Obviously, if there’s something I want to see or I need to take a break, I’ll watch a movie or something, but I could never have a TV in the studio. It was too much of a distraction. I learned that early on when I was working on Baker Street. At times I would listen to it in the background, but then I would start looking up over the table. That’s why radio shows are so great. You don’t have to stop and look up. You can keep working and not miss anything. MM: Do you have a favorite show? GD: I like various shows for various reasons. Obviously, I love The Shadow and The Green Hornet. I love Jack Benny and Phil Harris. I listen to Gunsmoke, Dimension X, X Minus One, Suspense, and Escape. Back before MP3s I was going broke buying these collections of shows. [laughter] And they saw you coming, too. They would milk you for tapes or CDs. Now it’s all on MP3, and you can get an entire run for five bucks.

MM: Once you sit down to start working, will you do warm-up sketches or are you able to just jump right into the work? GD: I can pretty much get right into the work. As far as how productive I am, it probably takes an hour or so before I’m going full tilt. I don’t do warm-up sketches, but I’ll do a little bit here and a little bit there. I’ll usually start with something that’s easy... maybe Johann pages. [laughter] When it gets to be around 11:00 and I’ve got a few pages under my belt, I can tackle the harder ones. MM: Earlier you mentioned doing layouts. Do you do full-sized layouts or just thumbnails? 85

Previous Page and Above: Thumbnails, pencils, and inks for B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess #5, page 4. As you can see, Guy does four thumbnail pages on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet of paper. His pencils are fairly loose, as he does most of the drawing in the inking stage.

GD: I lay out the script on notebook paper as thumbnails. I have four pages on each sheet, and it’s roughly breaking down the action. Below and Next Page: Pencils for pages 2 and 3 of The Marquis and the Midwife. The Marquis and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

MM: Do you work out the thumbnails while you read the script, or do you prefer to read the script all the way through before thinking about that? GD: I’m working on thumbnails as we speak. I get the script for John and print it out. I’ll read it through once just for enjoyment and to get all the images in my head. I’ll draw very tiny thumbnails on the edge of the script pages as I go. Then I’ll go back through and lay out the more finished thumbnails on notebook paper for

them to approve. That usually takes a day to do—an easy day. And they are really rough looking, too; I have to put notes all over the place so that it’s somewhat clear. The scribble with an A above his head is Abe—that type of thing. MM: Do you blow up your layouts and lightbox them when you pencil, or are they just a guide you refer to? GD: They’re just a reference. I have them next to me as I pencil. Once they’re approved I rule out the panels and gutters on the backs of the boards. Then I’ll make a note of roughly where and how big the word balloons will be. I do that for all 22 pages before I pencil anything. That sort of production line way of doing it is something I got into the habit of doing when I was on Mystery Theater. I found it easier to get things done that way. Instead of struggling with a page that I just couldn’t get past, I was moving all the way around. That way if time was running out, it wasn’t looking rushed at the end. That happened to me when I was doing The Realm. I would start out with all this detail, and near the end it was, “Oh! I’ve got to get this thing done!” and it got kind of loose. I started to mix it up, so if a page is rushed or looks loose, it’s stuck in the middle. Like I just had a bad day that day or fell off the stool or something. Once that’s done, if I’m warming up I’ll draw Johann doing his thing. If there’s something I really want to draw, I’ll go ahead and do that—but just the figures. I’ll draw all the figures throughout the book, then I’ll go back in and rough in all the backgrounds. MM: Do you go back and forth between penciling and inking or do you prefer to get all the penciling done before you start inking? GD: Once the layouts are approved I’ll pencil the entire book—and maybe two or three books, depending on the schedule— before I do any inking. I don’t usually mix it up unless I’m working on two things at once. Now that I’m doing the new Marquis series, sometimes at night if I get done with the pencils I’ll start inking The Marquis or do some work on a digital file. But as

far as one particular issue, I won’t tackle the inks until all the pencils have been approved. The penciling goes quick. I just penciled two issues of King of Fear in twelve days. Issue #4 was due on the twelfth, and that was more than enough time, so I went ahead and penciled issues #4 and 5. MM: You say that so nonchalantly, but there are so many artists I know who struggle to pencil half an issue in that amount of time. GD: There are artists out there who are faster than me. I got labeled as “Fastest Artist” in that Wizard article, which is embarrassing because there are faster artists out there. MM: Sergio Aragonés for one. GD: He finished a five-issue mini-series in the time it took us to talk about this. [laughter] That’s my speed now on something I’m familiar with. I didn’t start out this fast. I started out penciling a lot tighter. If you’re penciling for somebody else to ink your work, you’re not going to do it at the speed that I’m doing it or as loose as I’m doing it. If I took more time on a page, it would look the same as a page I rushed on. And a lot of times when I rush on a page, they like the energy of it. It doesn’t work to my advantage to take my time. That sounds awful. [laughter] If I pencil fast I get more time to ink, which is where I’m filling in a lot of the detail.

sometimes less, depending on the schedule. That’s a comfortable pace for me. I never really tried to rush, but used to try to get as much done as I could because I wanted to move on to the next thing. Nowadays I’m happy with a page a day. I feel a little more relaxed and not as stressed from the constant grind.

MM: How long do you spend inking a page? GD: I used to do a lot more in a day than I do now. I used to ink three or four pages a day. Now I’m happy doing just one or two pages a day. That’s a nice pace. I’m doing about an issue a month—a week or so to pencil and about three weeks to ink. Sometimes more,

MM: Do you tend to make a lot of corrections to your inks? 87

Below and Next Page: Pencils, inks, and final gray tones for page 4 of “The Marquis and the Coachman,” done for MySpace Dark Horse Presents. The Marquis and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis.

GD: Yeah. Early on I tried—I don’t know why—to not use whiteout. I think it’s a pride thing for an artist. “I don’t want to make any mistakes. It’ll make the original page look like crap.” Who cares? During Baker Street I tried to avoid using whiteout, because I would spend so much time on the zipatone and sometimes it would show through the zipatone. On Mystery Theater, I just wanted to make the book look the best it could in print, so if I had to do paste-ups or use whiteout, I didn’t care. They were scribbling all over it with blue pencil, so it didn’t matter if the physical page looked rotten as long as it printed well. I think using whiteout helped me

loosen up. Now, if I don’t like the way something looks, I’ll white it out and draw right on top of it—sometimes two or three times. [laughter] MM: It looks as though you use whiteout for an effect at times. There’s a scene in B.P.R.D. that’s set in a storm, and it looks like you used whiteout over the blacks to show the rain. GD: Maybe in some places. A lot of that could be Dave. I leave a lot of the special effects for Dave to put in. If it’s crossing over into black I might put in little dots with whiteout, but a lot of the time I’ll just indicate to Dave that it should be fine snow or whatever. But with The Marquis I use a lot of whiteout for effects, and I did that for the dream sequences in Sandman Mystery Theater, too. MM: So you prefer to make the corrections on the board as opposed to fixing things digitally? GD: Yes, because I want the board to be as finished as possible. I just started scanning my art and sending Dark Horse digital files with King of Fear. Up until then I always sent in the original boards. Certain things they would have to send back to me, I would say, “Just send me a high-res scan of that panel and I’ll fix it up and you can drop it back in.” MM: Will you draw digitally to make those types of corrections? GD: Yeah, I erase what’s there and use a Wacom tablet to draw in the correction. I got the Wacom tablet when I was doing the Pan’s Labyrinth DVD comics— just for coloring or grey tones, that’s what I used it for. I can’t draw with it at all. It’s like trying to use a brush: I don’t have enough control with it. I can fake it enough for putting in a tree or small things like that. And it’s easier to color with it, or to put in gray tones like I’m doing with The Marquis. MM: When you’re working on The Marquis—or anything else where you’re writing and drawing—do you write out a full script for yourself?

GD: I like going back and forth. I don’t know if I’d want to just do The Marquis. I’m happy doing all the stuff with Mike and John on B.P.R.D. If that’s the book I retire on, I’ll be happy, and I don’t want to retire soon. [laughter] I’ll be drawing the new Lobster Johnson series coming up, and I’m looking forward to that. They’re keeping me busy. I feel really happy where I’m at as far as my career and the work I’m getting to do. I get to do things I love doing and are great fun—Mike’s stuff and even the side projects I do at Dark Horse like Solomon Kane—and at the same time I get to work on my own books like The Marquis, where it’s complete self-expression. I’ll listen to what my editor has to say, obviously, and it’s a different pair of eyes, but if it’s something I want to do, even if it’s a mistake, I know they’re going to say, “Okay, go ahead. Make your mistake.” It’s good to have that strong collaboration and to also have a way of expressing what you want to tell in a story in the way you want to tell it.

GD: It’s more visual. I write notations like, “Pages four to eight, this happens. Pages nine to twelve, this happens.” Then I do small thumbnails. I don’t do the larger, tighter thumbnails for those, because they’re just for me to see. Early on with The Marquis I tried drawing the pages and then scripting afterwards, but I was rotten at it. So anything that has talking, I’m doing a full script for those scenes. And I’m actually laying it out a little tighter now that I’m working more closely with an editor at Dark Horse, and also because it has been so long since I first laid out The Midwife, I have all these little thumbnails and I find myself being like, “Wow, what is going on here? It’s got an M scribbled above it, so that’s the Marquis, but maybe it’s the Midwife.” [laughter] But it’s worked out, because I’ve been able to rewrite certain scenes that were a little dated or didn’t work like I thought they would. It’s still a more shorthand way of doing things when it’s just myself, but once I get past the layouts I work exactly the same as I would for B.P.R.D. MM: In an ideal world, would you want to be working on your own projects all the time, or do you prefer going back and forth? 89

Guy Davis

Left: Portrait of Sam, the troubled love interest of Sharon Ford. Right: Commission illustration of Sharon and Sam. Below Right: Chapter break illustrations of the cast of Baker Street. Page 92: Ad art for Sandman Mystery Theater’s “The Vamp” storyline. Page 93: Illustration for White Wolf Games’ Clanbook Nosferatu gaming supplement for Vampire: The Masquerade. Baker Street and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis. Sandman and all related characters ™ and ©2010 DC Comics. Vampire: The Masquerade ™ and ©2010 White Wolf, Inc.

Art Gallery

Left: Illustration for White Wolf Games’ Kindred of the East gaming supplement. Above and Right: Illustrations for White Wolf Games’ futuristic superhero role-playing game, Aberrant.

Left: Rom gets his Spaceknight on. Right: Calling Dick Tracy. Come in, Tracy. Guy’s homage to the greatest of newspaper strip detectives. Below: Metaluna Mary was drawn for a Fist-a-Cuffs online art competition, but Guy scrapped it for another design. Below Right: Pin-up art for Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury’s graphic novel, Aqua Leung. Page 98: Hellboy commission piece. Page 99: Art for the Hellboy II: The Golden Army DVD comic.

Rom ™ and ©2010 Parker Brothers. Dick Tracy ™ and ©2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc. Metaluna Mary ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis. Aqua Leung ™ and ©2010 Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury. Hellboy ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola.

This Page: Background art and separate layers that were combined into a moving DVD comic for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Right: Cover art for The Zombies That Ate the World.

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Page 102: Uncropped pin-up art for Brian Churilla’s The Engineer. Page 103: Pin-up for Alex Sheikman’s Robotika. Page 104: Poster art for a store signing. Page 105: Pin-up for Chris Wisnia’a Doris Danger Seeks... Where Urban Creatures Creep & Stomp. Previous Page: Cover art for The Nevermen #1. Left: You can’t go wrong with a human head on a gorilla body. Inside front cover art for The Nevermen: Streets of Blood #2. Below: Page 11 of The Nevermen: Streets of Blood #2. The Engineer ™ and ©2010 Brian Churilla. Robotika ™ and ©2010 Alex Sheikman. Doris Danger ™ and ©2010 Chris Wisnia. The Nevermen and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Dark Horse Comics.

This Page: Cover art for B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground #3. Next Page: Daimio meets his final fate? The final page of the five-issue B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground mini-series.

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This Page: Pages 3 and 4 of B.P.R.D.: The Warning #5. In the background is page 5 of “B.P.R.D.: Revival” done for MySpace Dark Horse Comics Presents. Next Page: Cover for The Zombies That Ate the World. Page 112: Pin-up art for Stan Sakai’s Space Usagi. Page 113: Page 8 of Jamie Rich’s “Kago No Tori” from 2005’s The Dark Horse Book of the Dead.

B.P.R.D. and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Mike Mignola. Space Usagi ™ and ©2010 Stan Sakai. The Zombies That Ate the World and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Humanoids. Kago No Tori ©2010 Guy Davis and Jamie Rich.

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This Page: Design for the Black Riders in Solomon Kane: Death’s Black Riders #3. Next Page: Unused ad art for The Marquis. Page 116: Art for Humanoïdes’ French edition of The Marquis: Intermezzo. Page 117: Art for The Marquis and the Midwife. Solomon Kane and all related characters ™ and ©2010 Solomon Kane LLC. The Marquis ™ and ©2010 Guy Davis

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THE MODERN MASTERS SERIES Edited by ERIC NOLENWEATHINGTON, these trade paperbacks and DVDs are devoted to the BEST OF TODAY’S COMICS ARTISTS! Each book contains RARE AND UNSEEN ARTWORK direct from the artist’s files, plus COMPREHENSIVE INTERVIEWS (including influences and their views on graphic storytelling), SKETCHBOOK SECTIONS, and more! And don’t miss the companion DVDs, showing artists at work in their studios!

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COMIC BOOK CREATOR is the new voice of the comics medium, devoted to the work and careers of the men and women who draw, write, edit, and publish comics, focusing always on the artists and not the artifacts, the creators and not the characters. Edited by JON B. COOKE.

DRAW! is the professional “How-To” magazine on cartooning and animation. Each issue features in-depth interviews and stepby-step demonstrations from top comics professionals. Most issues contain nudity for figure-drawing instruction; Mature Readers Only. Edited by MIKE MANLEY.

JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR celebrates the life and career of the “King” of comics through interviews with Kirby and his contemporaries, feature articles, and rare & unseen Kirby artwork. Now full-color, the magazine showcases Kirby’s art even more dynamically. Edited by JOHN MORROW.

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GUY DAVIS Guy Davis is a master of the macabre, the mysterious... the just plain creepy! But underlying the eerie quality of his artwork is a remarkable sense of storytelling. Emotion veritably drips from his pen, filling his work with life and energy—even if he’s drawing the undead! From his breakthrough hit Baker Street, to the pulp-noir Sandman Mystery Theater, to his current work on the Hellboy spin-off series B.P.R.D. and his own series The Marquis, Davis has shown time and again that he is one of the best in the business. Now the veil has been lifted on the life and career of this Eisner Award-winning writer/artist — Guy Davis, Modern Master! MODERN MASTERS is an ongoing series of books celebrating the lives and work of the greatest comic book artists of our time. ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-023-6 ISBN-10: 1-60549-023-7

51595

$15.95 In The US ISBN

978-1-60549-023-6

Baker Street, The Marquis © Guy Davis • The Nevermen © Phil Amara & Guy Davis BPRD © Mike Mignola Zombies That Ate the World © Les Humanoides Associes Sandman © DC Comics