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Interview Part 2
[Desperately
flicking through notes] So, you've already covered about 15 questions I had
for you… Actually, there was something quite specific I was curious about
in your strip work. There's a lot of double-page layouts. Is that something you
choose to bring in, or -?
Yes. That is something
I personally sought to bring in. The writers hardly ever prescribe double-page
spreads. What I tend to do is, where I see that mechanically it's feasible to
fuse two of the pages together, I'll do it, especially where there is a big action
event. I audition them at the start, and if I see that it's not going to work
I scrap it: I'd never force it and I do make sure it works naturally. So it's
become part of my take on the art of storytelling. It reads fine and sometimes
it reads better than fine, but it always feels more… dramatic.
Who are the
influences on your style?
The first and
most important would have to be Moebius, especially in terms of design. I still
think Moebius is the best designer ever to work in the field of science fiction
and fantasy and I don't see anyone coming along in the next 50 years who'll do
better work than he does. There's a guy from Spain, Gimenez, who works for Humanoids
and Heavy Metal who's also an incredible designer.
Then Simon Bisley,
of course. It's funny, when I was at college, I remember thinking "I'll do
a painterly style in comics and, oh, I'll be the first person ever to do that!"
But then Bisley came and blew us all away with this new, visceral interpretation.
Of course, some of us who'd always been inclined to painting anyway ended up being
influenced by him. A lot of people start out initially heavily influenced by his
style, and then gradually you find your own way. Well, some of us have, anyway.
2000AD was very
painterly in the 90's, with many Bisley clones [Siku agrees enthusiastically].
And now, in common with many of the artists you've gradually moved away from paint.
Yes, I have. Now
I use largely Photoshop 6 for strip work - the other versions are really bad updates.
I do still paint, though. I use it a lot for conceptual work for computer games
now, and might hopefully be doing a very important book in the near future, which
will include a lot of heavy painting on canvas, some deeply serious stuff. At
which point I'd hope to go back to painting my strip work properly as well.
Can you tell
us any more about the project?
No, it's a deep,
deep secret right now. I'll give 2000AD Review an exclusive when I can, I promise!
One of the
things that you've done besides painting is that you've actually written a multi-parter
yourself. What was that experience like?
Well, I do write
regularly as well - unfortunately, there isn't always time to write and create
art to the right level. So while I have had some opportunity, I haven't really
had as much as I'd have liked. I did write and draw "Kane and Abe" for
Front magazine for 6 months, which was a very enjoyable experience.
With Pan African
Judges, the script for the first series was written by Paul [Cornell], who is
English, and it was based on a lot of research. I wanted to write something that
wasn't based on research so much as on personal experience. Which I have since,
though I was born in Leicester, I was educated in Nigeria. And I thought I had
a solid idea; the Pan-African Judges against the Gods of West Africa. My brother,
Akin, does a lot of work for Nickelodeon as a producer and scriptwriter, so I
asked him to co-write it with me. So how we worked was I would come up with the
rough ideas, he would then write the details, break them down, re-arrange them.
Towards the middle of the process, the roles kind of switched and he would write
an A4 story, I would draw it out, and he would then write the script for the 6-pager.
So it was an
advantage working with your brother?
Oh yes, our thought
patterns are very similar. I always know that he's thinking what I'm thinking.
And there's a lot of give-and-take between us, a lot of flexibility. That made
it one of the most enjoyable creative experiences I'd had.
It's interesting
what you say about experience, because when you look at the 3 large-scale African
stories that ran in the Megazine over about 2 years, there's a very obvious contrast.
PAJ I treats Africa politically, it's the site of poverty and pity. Fetish, on
the other hand, seems to come entirely from the old colonial ideas of a "dark
continent". Was there a political intent for you in taking such a different
perspective to these two?
Absolutely none
whatsoever! That is what happens when you write from experience. Rather than writing
from politics, you're simply taking the world as it is now, and imagining where
it can be in, say, 500 years' time. So if you read my Pan-African Judges, it is
absolutely un-political.
For example, I'm
a Christian, but the leading actors are all Muslims. You've got Muslims, you've
got the white South African, you've got your black Briton who's come over with
her so-say "Afrocentric" ideas and she's shocked that Africans are not
actually Afrocentric! [Laughs] And then you've got the pagans also. So,
it's a nice mix, simply exploring people without having an agenda. I was glad
to see that some people got that.
They were actually
at one point thinking of making it into a graphic novel. Unfortunately, there
just weren't enough pages. It had about 48 pages, and it needed to be slightly
larger.
So all you
need to do really is get them to accept an additional script?
Well, there is
actually a story about what happens to Becky afterwards. She wants to take revenge
on Sadiq, and he ends up in court, charged with slave-trading. Unfortunately,
it doesn't look like we'll get the chance to do that! But who knows? Life is stranger
than fiction…
So the use of
the Yoruba Gods in that story, was that again based on personal experience?
My brother did
a lot of research. Because I was only dealing with the block ideas, just the most
basic premise like "the Gods have come back because the Africans have disowned
them". My brother came up with the fine details, like the slavery idea. When
I was doing the art, though, then I would come up with stuff that he didn't expect:
things he was shocked at! Things like the picture of this great expanse, with
a pyramid in the middle, and all these hundreds of people on one side and Shango
on the other. That's an image I'm still proud of, but he had to really struggle
to write around it!
As for the look of the Gods, well we already knew exactly what they looked like.
Shango, for example, actually carried a hammer, and was the God of Thunder and
Lightning, just like Thor. Their stories are very similar indeed. Ogun, the god
of war, metal and iron, very similar in particular to the old German God of War.
This all just shows that all people come from one thread, there is something like
a common culture. I was amazed with the way all these old legends obviously find
their way back to one original source. Shango's hammer is the traditional design.
Ogun was known to be a man of a thousand daggers, so I put him in a traditional
buba, a short-sleeved overall and baggy pants, and I designed this to consist
of a thousand daggers. There's a guy in there too called Sopona, essentially a
trickster - in fact, he's the mirror image of Loki, neither of them are evil incarnate,
they're just these very tricksy figures. So to get that across visually, I made
him slightly glassy, so you're never quite sure what you're looking at.
So some things
were extrapolated and some things were real.
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