What is it that drew you to the artform of comics?
I have no idea.
Comics have been around me my entire life. No one in my family read them, yet there's pictures of me as barely a toddler with comic books around. My best guess is that they were packaged together with Masters of the Universe toys and I had plenty of those. I can't recall the point I fell in love with comics -- I was too young, but I do know its been my number one love ever since. I read a ton of prose, I watch an ungodly amount of movies, I think narrative television is more interesting than its been in years, I'm obsessed with history, I've got a decent sized vinyl collection, but comics is the storytelling medium ruling my life both in terms of input and output.
There's a lot driving this passion/obsession -- I think lately due to a growing appreciation for the absolute freedom you get in the medium. People have such a boner for making movies and thinking comics is a stepping stone to do so and I don't really get it, because it seems so fucking backwards. You can do anything with comics. It's the most primal, visceral link to artistic expression, one of the greatest bastions for unrestrained storytelling developed over the last one hundred years. With movies these days you need millions of dollars to produce, then millions more to market something to any sort of decent level of distribution, something that is more likely than not complete garbage because it's had the dicks of way too many people who don't know what they're doing slammed right into what was once possibly someone's artistic vision.
And yeah, sure, there's a bit of that in comics too. Plenty of garbage comics are developed on committee. However,while I've got a bit of editorial and corporate oversight with my Marvel work, I've had an absolutely great time working there. And maybe I've been ridiculously lucky, because everyone I've dealt with at Marvel and even some people at DC have been nothing but fantastic to work with. Even when I don't agree with my Marvel editors and those few DC editors, I get what they're saying. I still fight for what I believe, but in the end, I feel the work's better for the collective voice.
With what I do at Image? Forget about it. Nothing comes close in any other medium at any other company to what I do there in terms of pure artistic freedom, for good and bad. Like, on Hell Yeah, I was figuring out what to do with this freedom and maybe it would have been better if it had been a B&W series published by Eclipse or whoever instead of a full color ongoing series in the biggest year Image has ever had, but that led to Glory which led to everything else I'm doing. And with Glory? Ross and I had complete and unrestrained freedom. If anything, the guy that would have traditionally been the person to hold us back in the form of the owner, in this case Rob Liefeld, did the exact opposite and pushed us to keep pushing the book.
What I'm getting at is if you have a story to tell, nothing beats comics. Just be sure you're creating comics to create comics. If you're creating comics to make a movie or a video game you're wasting everyone's damn time, whether it's your creative team or reader or anyone remotely involved. Just this morning I was looking at Tom Scioli's Satan's Soldier and the idea of a movie bores the shit out of me. It's so much more imaginative and interesting than any movie could ever hope to be. Or like, Lone Wolf & Cub. Those movies are fantastic. I particularly love the Shogun Assassin edit. But the comics? Infinitely better.
If someone wants to make a movie or whatever out of what my collaborators and I do? Great, sure, whatever. The moment that takes away from me doing comics? Not going to happen. Not going to cross that Rubicon. Some people can make it work. I admire Robert Kirkman for being able to balance it with everything else and still writing two of my favorite comics (I've never enjoyed Walking Dead or Invincible more than I do now) and have his hand in a TV show that's really damn good.
But still, all this said: in terms of storytelling mediums? Comics is The Greatest of All Time. That's why I love them more than any other.
What makes a comic book stand out to you?
I've been kind of obsessed with Soderbergh's recent San Francisco International Film Festival State of Cinema talk for a number of reasons. I think a lot of it applies to any commoditized art form, of which comics is obviously one. The notion applicable here is how he defines the term 'Cinema'. To quote, "The simplest way that I can describe [Cinema] is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that's made," and further, "[Cinema] isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form." And for good and bad. He admits this means there's plenty of bad 'Cinema.'
Regardless, those are the types of comics that enthrall me. The stuff that wouldn't exist without the authors existing. Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese. Howard Chaykin's American Flagg. Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon & Matt Fraction's Casanova. Moebius' Aedena Cycle. Michael & Laura Allred's Madman. Los Bros Hernandez's Love & Rockets. Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys. Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon. Blutch's So, Long Silver Screen. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland. Fiona Staples & Brian K Vaughn's Saga. Brandon Graham's Multiple Warheads. Frank Miller's Ronin. Jim Rugg's Afrodisiac. Jack Kirby's Kamandi. Al Columbia's Biologic Show. Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira. Tom Scioli's American Barbarian. Ben Marra's… everything, really.
There are even a number of Big Two books falling underneath this too -- classics like Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's Dark Knight Returns, Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy's Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, Jim Starlin's Warlock or more modern titles like David Aja & Matt Fraction's Hawkeye or Absolutely Anything Sara Pichelli Is Drawing. Not only would this stuff not exist without its authors, but they all push what the medium is capable of -- show that all that's gone before is merely what's gone before and that its maximum potential is infinite, limited only by imagination.
Who’s your favorite superhero and why?
Savage Dragon. No contest. I've been reading that series on a (kind of sometimes mostly) monthly basis since the first issue dropped in 1992. The series itself is one of the most disgustingly under appreciated cartooning achievements in the last twenty years or so. The fact Larsen doesn't get enough credit for not just the sheer amount of work, but the constant experimentation going on is really a damn shame. The newest issue has a digest version coming out. Why? Just to see what would happen. Some issues have been drawn in a Euro-style, some with panels counting down until the end, some all over the place all built around a mythology unparalleled in a single creator comic since Cerebus or Gasoline Alley. We've seen characters born, age, die -- it's really a huge achievement. I wish it had a more consistent backlist program so people could get on board with much more ease. In the meantime, Dragon's son Malcon is taking over the book with issue 193 and my understanding is you can get into it without having read a single issue, so get on that.
What’s one of your favorite graphic novels and why?
The one I'm curating for Pulllist. I'm guessing I'm not to say what it is at this point, but it's my number one Go To when someone asks, "what's the deal with comics? What should I be reading?" It definitely falls under that list of comics I mentioned earlier -- something that wouldn't exist without its authors. Something that really pushes what comics are. Furthermore, it's a brilliant illustration of the power of comics collaboration -- when artist and writer work in simpatico to create something that wouldn't exist if only one of them were alive.
Any particular graphic novels coming out that you’re looking forward to?
I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Paul Pope's Battling Boy and I'm really looking forward to that knocking everyone on their ass. Likewise, I'm looking forward to the impending explosion of James Harvey. Yeah, there's a bias there because we're working on a mini-series together, but I'm telling you in two-three years that guy is going to be massive. I just look at what he's doing on Masterplasty and Zygote and they are so damn good they revive the horribly cliched term, 'next level.' Dude's from another planet. Comic Books, James Harvey is Your Future.
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