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Interview Part 3
 PART
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1st
December 03
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Your work recently
for 2000AD has been, well, like nothing in the comic before. For the budding artists
out there, how do you create the look you achieved in Leviathan?
Okay, well I think
it's important for budding artists to first understand the thought process that
goes behind creating the look for a comic. In my case, I always start with the
story. Everything I do, drawing style, inking style, colouring/mood, all should
serve to help tell the story.
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Leviathan's
"negative glow"
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Leviathan contains
a descent from the rarified heights of first class, down through second class
and steerage to the infernal depths of the engine room. So an early decision was
that the art style would get gritter the further into the bowels of the ship you
went, with no rendering at all in the scenes in first class, to give them an extra-clean
look. I did want something extra, though, to give the first-class scenes a slight
sense of unreality, to convey the idea that the ship is cursed. My first model
for this was the "black-backed" sunlit scene at the conclusion of the
film "Dark City," where everything feels slightly unreal and nightmarish.
The unusual look
to the first class scenes in Leviathan (for which David Brunt coined the phrase
"negative glow") was arrived at by accident. I said that I wanted a
clean look for the scenes in First Class. The first day I'm drawing this stuff,
I'm drawing all these characters in black suits against black backgrounds, and
I'm doing it the way I used to with pen and paper, which is to draw black outlines
and then leave a gap between the black line and the solid black background. Suddenly
it occurred to me that if I just converted the outlines to grey I could slap one
chunk of black behind the whole thing and save loads of time. So I fiddled around
with the colour of the outlines for a bit, and experimented with putting bits
of white and grey in, and voila! - the effect we all know and love.
As to how exactly
I create the look? Like
this.
The visual
impact of Leviathan is stunning, from the sense of scale given to the ship itself,
to the demon Hastur, were you given free reign on the designs, or how much came
from the script?
Thank you!
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The
final Hastur
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When Ian and I
start out on a project, he tends to ring me with a basic idea - "let's have
a mystery story set on a mile-long ocean liner" - and then we'll bat stuff
back and forth. Originally I used to suggest visual stuff and he plot and character
ideas, as we've worked together more that's relaxed - so for example, he came
up with the look for Lament, Leviathan's main character, and I came up with Leviathan
crashing into Manhattan at the end.
One thing most
people don't realise, though, is how long Leviathan was in planning. Ian originally
came up with it as an idea for a graphic novel for Catalan back in 94 or 95, so
it's been bumming around for a long time, slowly developing with each new publisher
we tried to sell it to. That said, I didn't produce much in the way of concept
drawings until 2000, when Coolbeans showed a serious interest.
So, in fact, there
was a whole sheaf of concept stuff worked out before the first script was written
for 2000AD. A couple of things were changed - Lament was originally based closely
on Hercule Poirot, and the ship was five miles long, but we realised that was
too big - so for example, when Lament overlooks the ship from one of the towers,
it would have just looked like an island. One mile long is manageably huge, though
I think I did let the scale wobble a tiny bit :-)
Hastur didn't emerge
as a character until Ian had scripted the first few episodes of Leviathan, so
he rang me to let me know a design would be needed and I mailed him some JPEGs
for approval. The body came pretty quickly, but I think I did a sheet full of
different heads and let Ian "mix and match."
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Hastur
development sketches
(click to enlarge) |
The finale of
Leviathan, with the ship running aground in New York, is pretty eye popping; those
images must be fun to create?
I nearly went blind!
Though it's no one's fault but my own. When we got to Part 10, Ian was having
difficulty fitting everything in, which left me waiting for script. Knowing that
we were going to have four pages of Leviathan crashing into Manhattan, we worked
"Marvel method" on those pages, i.e. I roughed them out and Ian added
dialogue afterwards. So, in fact, I'm the one responsible for the infamous "Ernie
and Bert" page that attracted so much negative comment!
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The
Leviathan docks
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My big problem
was that I'd just moved out to Vienna, and my reference books had got lost in
the post (they arrived the day after I finished the job!) so I was trawling the
Internet for photos of Manhattan from the 1940's. New York is a work in progress,
so if you try and use modern photos as reference, there's a great forest of towers
that have sprung up since.
There weren't any
panoramas of the type I needed, so I placed the best matching images into the
Illustrator documents for the pages, distorted them to fit the perspective grids,
traced over them and drew imaginary cityscape around them to fill in the panels.
My main memory
of that time, is of sitting hunched over the graphics tablet in the near-tropical
Viennese summer heat, noodling away at great swathes of "greeblies"
(my term for the little calligraphic marks used to imply tiny buildings). I always
say, if you finish a page feeling as if you've been worked over, you know it's
a good 'un. That time, I felt as if I'd been worked over by three naked women
shotput champions armed with frozen haddock with nails driven into them.
Are there any
plans for any more adventures for Sergeant Lament, and if not, are you and Ian
Edginton planning to work together again?
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Lazarus
Churchyard
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Ian and I will
certainly work together again - we joke that we're like an old married couple.
The funny thing is, our last two projects (Leviathan and Scarlet Traces) were
conceived in the mid-nineties, and it occurred to us while we were finishing Leviathan
that we'd not come up with anything new since! So we're batting around ideas right
now.
A part of me would
like to do more with Lament - just because he's so atypical as a 2000AD character,
this middle-aged guy with no shoulder pads, but the problem is that Leviathan
was a situation-based story (the giant ship lost at sea) with a clear ending.
If we did anything more with Lament, we would have to come up with a new situation
to match that, and that's quite a tall order!
What's with the
constant references to "fishpaste?" Do you manage to get that into all
your work? And what made you stick with the pen-name "D'israeli"
In answer to both:
silliness!
The fishpaste thing
was inspired by "Geof Darrow's Comics and Stories," an outsize-format
French album containing most of Darrow's Bourbon Thret stories (later reprinted
individually by Dark Horse in Cheval Noir, I think). Darrow's famous for piling
on the detail, but in those early stories in particular, he'd play games with
the backgrounds; if the action took place on a crowded street, there'd be other
sequences of action going on with the characters in the background, bizarre characters,
little jokes, stuff you could look at for hours after you'd read the main story.
And this approach - of rewarding the reader for paying extra attention to your
work - really appealed to me, and I wanted to think of some thing I could do in
a similar vein. So that's what the fishpaste thing is; a little reward for paying
attention. You spot one, you're in the club - I should have badges made :-)
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(Incidentally,
the name "Star Brand" on jars of fishpaste refers to the Green Star,
symbol of the International Esperanto language movement. Grandan "saluton"
al cxuij 2000AD-legantaj samideanoj!)
The reason for
sticking with D'Israeli as a pen name comes from long-standing problems with getting
my given name across. As Matt Brooker, I've been called Mark/Max/Andrew(!) Brooks/Brook/Booker.
When I was sixteen, there was a talk at school, given by a social worker called
Cactus Leach. When we asked him the obvious question, he replied that he often
dealt with people in extreme difficulty, and if someone needed to get hold of
him in an emergency, they wouldn't forget his name, nor would anyone taking such
a call in his department have trouble working out who the caller wanted. So that's
the practical reason; people don't forget "D'Israeli," and they don't
mistake it for anything else.
But the real reason
is still silliness.
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