Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category
Canadian artist Ken Lashley is ready for a new path in life - one that doesn't include drawing comic books to make a living.
For now, at least.
Lashley talks with JPK about why he's decided to take a break from working in the comic biz, what Marvel Comics thinks about this move, his new gig as creative director at TransGaming Technologies in Toronto and more. Just click the green arrow below.
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JPK talks to filmmaker and actor Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Zack And Miri Make A Porno) about his book/blog collection, My Boring-Ass Life, working on TV and the best part of being famous.
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Steve Niles, writer of 30 Days Of Night. Photo by Tim Bradstreet.
Steve Niles is surprisingly cheerful for a man with blood slowly dripping out of his arm.
The acclaimed horror novelist and comic book scribe is such a busy man these days he even has to double up his newspaper interviews with his medical appointments (he’s healthy as a horse, by the way).
The biggest thing on the 42-year-old’s plate — ahead of writing Criminal Macabre for Dark Horse Comics, Bad Planet for Image Comics and the highly anticipated new book, Simon Dark, for DC Comics — is the impending release of the film 30 Days Of Night, based on a comic book, and screenplay, by Niles.
“I really is just the thrill of my life,” he says of the film.
“[Producer] Sam Raimi and [director] David Slade did more than justice to the comic. It’s faithful to the comic and it’s a really solid horror movie.”
The appeal of the story — which revolves around a group of people trying to survive after vampires invade an Alaskan town where the sun goes down for one month — comes from a different take on its villains, according to the creator.
“[Films like] Underworld and Blade have really humanized vampires and made them action heroes, while [novelist] Anne Rice has made them sympathetic romance characters and what we really set out to do in 30 Days Of Night is to make vampires scary again,” Niles says.
“We stripped away all that humanity and just made it so all they see when they look at a human is food — nothing more.”
Having the film arrive in theatres in October is also a strange twist of fate, according to the writer.
“I pitched it around when I got to Hollywood about 10 or 11 years ago and got no’s across the board,” says Niles, who’ll be a guest at this weekend’s Rue Morgue Festival of Fear (www.rue-morgue.com/festival.php) as part of Fan Expo Canada at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
“Then when [publisher] IDW started, my friend Ted Adams called at said ‘Well, we really can’t pay any money, but if you have any ideas for comics, let me know.’ I literally just sent him my failed movie pitch list and he called back and said ‘Hey, this one about vampires in Alaska looks pretty good.’”
Things heated up quickly after the comic, drawn by gifted Australian artist Ben Templesmith, began to take shape, Niles says.
“We started doing the comic and the day the ad came out we started getting calls from the studios — from the very same people who had turned it down,” he says with a laugh.
Back on the comic book front, Niles said he’s very excited about the upcoming release of Simon Dark, which features a creator-owned character that resides in DC Comics’ infamous Gotham City
“It’s a take on the Frankenstein mythology,” Niles explains. “It’s a boy who’s only 17-years-old who’s living in a burned-out church and doesn’t know who he is — all he knows is that he’s made up of other people.
“The story is about him finding out who he is, who made him and what this world is that he’s been introduced to.”
• 30 Days Of Night arrives in theatres on Oct. 19, but a live-action prequel written by Niles called 30 Days Of Night: Blood Trails will begin on www.fearnet.com in September.
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Award-winning writer Paul Dini.
They’ve been the secret architects behind some of your favourite TV shows for years.
From cult classics like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel to such recent hits as Lost and Heroes, veteran comic book creators have been writing the adventures on your tube every week.
“If you’re writing comics and doing it well, it shows that you have a visual sense and you can really figure out how to make things look dramatic,” says Paul Dini, an Emmy Award-winning TV writer and producer, who is also a prolific and successful comic book creator.
“I would say it makes an excellent calling card for someone looking to get into movies or film.”
Some notable crossover creators include: Ben Edlund, creator of The Tick and longtime writer for Buffy and Angel; Jeph Loeb, who’s known for writing the acclaimed epic Batman: The Long Halloween as well as working on the breakout hit, Heroes; Brian K. Vaughan, the award-winning co-creator of Y: The Last Man, also a staff writer on Lost; and Dini, one of the main men behind Batman: The Animated Series and piles of other award-winning cartoon projects. He also did a two-year stint on Lost before becoming the current writer of Detective Comics.
The reason comic creators are getting scooped up by Hollywood is simply a love of the medium, says Dini, a featured guest at this weekend’s annual Fan Expo Canada (www.fanexpocanada.com) at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
“I think a lot of it is that the producers who are doing TV now either grew up reading comics as fans of the books themselves or wanting to write comics,” he says. “So when they look around for writers, they choose writers whose work they like in different mediums.”
Dini’s life has been a hectic one since leaving Lost, as he’s taken on penning Batman’s monthly adventures in Detective as well as becoming head writer of DC Comics’ hot new weekly series, Countdown.
“I’ve been living with it for almost a year now and I’ve enjoyed it since the moment it started,” Dini says of Countdown, a prequel series for DC’s highly anticipated 2008 crossover event, Final Crisis.
“It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s satisfying to see it come out and it’s great to hear fans are reading it and enjoying it.”
As for his preference between working on comics and on TV shows, Dini says it’s no contest.
“Between the two of them, for creativity, I prefer comics because you can generally do what you want,” he says, “and if I’m dealing with my own characters then the sky’s the limit.”
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Canadian creator, Seth.
The Toronto Comic Arts Festival hits the city this weekend packed with a veritable who’s who of top cartoonists — both from Canada and abroad.
Headlining this event is the on-stage reuniting of longtime Toronto comic book icons Joe Matt, Chester Brown and Seth.
Just ahead of his get-together, Seth (yes, just Seth) took time out to speak with JPK about why TCAF is important, the many projects he’s got on the go and why it’s so much fun to torture Joe Matt.
JPK: Tell me about the significance of having Chet, Joe and yourself reunited on stage.
Seth: “We were close friends and working artists together for a long time, maybe 10 years, in Toronto. Then Joe moved away to Los Angeles and I moved to Guelph and it’s just been a long time since we spent any significant time together.
“Even though there’s a stage event of getting together, the nicest part is for us just to be together after a quite a bit of time.”
JPK: Joe recently published Spent, a collection of some issues of his comic, Peepshow, and the friendship between the three of you is a large element. Is the story an accurate reflection of your relationship with one another?
Seth: “It’s accurate in some sense and in others it’s not — which is one of the things we hope to take him to task for when we see him. Rereading the book myself, I was reminded of how inaccurate it actually was.
“You can’t really argue with someone’s interpretation of how they see you. I come off much more significantly mean than, well, my wife might think, but the truth is I was probably a lot meaner to Joe than I was to anyone else.
“When you read something like that you realize that you’re kind of a puppet for the other person’s opinions. A lot of the stuff in there where I say ‘this is nothing like me’ I think ‘well, this is exactly like Joe’. Because it’s just an opportunity for Joe to get someone else to say the things that he can’t have himself saying in every panel.
“But it’s a funny book, though. You can’t get too angry.”
JPK: What’s your impression of this weekend’s third biennial Toronto Comics Arts Festival?
Seth: “I think it’s a really good event for Toronto. I think it’s nice to actually get away from the idea of the comic book convention, per se, which generally have been focused on collecting. What’s nice about TCAF is that it’s really focused more on the art form. It gives people an opportunity to come out and see comics, not purely from that collecting sort of angle, and promotes it as an art form that is coming into its own finally.”
JPK: Do you enjoy getting the chance to meet your fans and hear their feedback?
Seth: “I’m not one of those people who really enjoys meeting the public. I’m comfortable with it, since I’ve done enough of it over the years now, but it’s just too hard to have a meaningful conversation with someone who’s coming up to have a book signed.
“I tend to be the type of person who’s happy to just sit in the studio alone at home.”
JPK: What do you expect from your stage appearance on Saturday night?
Seth: “I think we’re counting, on some degree, on being able to have an actual conversation.
“Chet and I have sat down and done a bit of talking about what kind of direction it might go. We certainly want to put Joe on the spot in some manner or other. He seems just sort of to demand that kind of behaviour from you.
“We’re going to focus on Joe, primarily, since he’s the one coming through town with a new book. We want to give him a chance to really talk about what his artistic choices were — and then hopefully we’ll tear him to pieces over it.” *laughs*
JPK: I understand you’re currently working on a project for the New York Times?
Seth: “I finished that up now and I’m working on expanding it into a book.”
JPK: Is that what you’re primarily working on right now?
Seth: “It’s one of a couple of things I’m working on. Right now I’m working on finishing up my next issue of my Palookaville comic which is continuing on a story called Clyde Fans, which I’ve been working on for years. I’m hoping on getting a couple more of those out within the calendar year.
“As soon as that’s done I’m back to what I was just talking about, which is George Sprott. That’ll take me probably a couple of months, to get that together into a book.
“At the same time as that I’m working on a collection for [Canadian publisher] Drawn & Quarterly on Doug Wright. It’s going to be a two-volume series on his life’s work.
“He was an amazing cartoonist. I collected his work and studied him for about 10 years at least, as a collector, planning this book series, but then when it actually got underway we actually tracked down his family and went into the archives where he has donated all his work and it really was an eye opener to see the amount of work and the quality of work he did in his life.
“I think it’s going to be an impressive series for Canadians to see, too, because I don’t think we have much of a sense of the history of cartooning here in Canada.”
JPK: And, of course, you’re still working away on the design for Fantagraphics’ Peanuts collections?
Seth: “Oh yeah. There’s one out now and I’ll have to start work on another in a couple of months — it’s going like clockwork. I can pretty much gauge where my life is going just by whether or not I’m working on one of those books or not.
“I enjoy working on it, but I’m looking forward to that day [eight years from now] when I can put volume 25 on the shelf and be done.”
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Strangers In Paradise creator Terry Moore.
This week marked the end of an era in comics as a group of characters that many readers discovered as strangers for the first time 14 years ago departed as friends.
The final issue of Terry Moore’s Strangers In Paradise, a highly acclaimed independent comic book centring around the day-to-day (and often offbeat) lives of two women — Francine and Katchoo — arrived in stores on Wednesday, much to the delight of its creator.
“It really feels terrific,” Moore said in a telephone interview from his Houston home yesterday. “It’s the completion of a dream for me.”
Moore said the stretch run to completing this long-running story wasn’t without stress.
“It’s been 14 years and I have to admit for about the last year I was just hoping I wouldn’t get hit by a bus,” he joked. “I just wanted to finish it.”
The monthly book had been building toward a natural conclusion for a while, said Moore, a guest of honour at this weekend’s Paradise Toronto Comicon at the Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place (www.torontocomicon.com).
“I always had in mind to end it when Katchoo and Francine got to a certain point in their lives,” said the 52-year-old creator. “After a long, and kind of wandering middle, the story did reach the point where it needed to end.”
Now that this milestone issue is released, Moore admits he’s looking forward to the same thing many of his fans are.
“When I get home from all this touring, I’m just going to sit down and read the series from beginning to end and to just try to enjoy it as a reader,” he said. “I haven’t done that in quite a while.”
And don’t look for Moore to rest on his laurels.
He said he’s going to write a couple mainstream books that have not been announced yet and he also has a few more original creations to share.
“I do have a backlog of characters and stories here waiting to go,” Moore said. “I just got kind of fixated on the Strangers In Paradise cast.
“It’s kind of like writing a play and it becomes a hit and you’re stuck performing it for a long time. I’ve had a lot of plays backing up in the studio and I’m looking forward to getting them out.”
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New Wonder Woman writer Gail Simone.
Gail Simone is one of the hardest working writers in comic books.
She first caught readers’ eyes with her witty wordplay for Marvel Comics’ Deadpool and quickly rose to stardom by taking DC Comics’ Birds Of Prey to new heights, leading to her taking on the adventures of Superman in Action Comics and showing why being bad is so darned good in the acclaimed miniseries, Villains United.
More recently she’s completed a Secret Six miniseries and writes the monthly comics: The All New Atom, Gen 13 and Welcome To Tranquility.
And now comes Simone’s greatest challenge, as she’s signed on to tackle the adventures of one of DC’s most iconic creations, Wonder Woman.
“Wonder Woman is the premiere female action hero of all time, in my opinion,” Simone said in a phone interview this week from her Oregon home, ahead of her trip to Toronto where she’ll be a guest at the Women Of Comics symposium as part of this weekend’s Paradise Toronto Comicon (www.torontocomicon.com).
“I’ve written Wonder Woman in a few different projects — in a JLA Classified six-issue arc and once in Birds Of Prey — and I really love writing her character.”
Penning tales of the Amazon princess is rife with challenges, Simone said.
“There’s going to be some difficulty because she has such a long history and everyone knows Wonder Woman and everything, but I’m just really just excited to get her back to being the No. 1 female super-hero in the world and to make her the star of her own book,” she said.
The fact that Simone is the first woman to write the character on an ongoing basis is fun, but daunting, the creator admits.
“I’m really excited and I’m kind of nervous, too, because I have the added thing of a mainstream female comic book writer getting to do Wonder Woman and there seems to be a lot of anticipation,” Simone said.
“I don’t want to let people down.”
And making the move to Wonder Woman hasn’t come without a price.
Simone is ending her over four-year run on Birds Of Prey as a result.
“It was really hard,” Simone said of leaving the book. “I still have moments where I’m really sad because I really miss the characters because I wrote them for so long.
“(But) I feel that I reached my goal, which was to make those three characters — (Black) Canary, Huntress and Oracle — lead characters, not just sidekicks or plot points for the male characters.”
And Simone hopes readers will agree that the move is worth it.
“I don’t want to give away too much, but I can guarantee you it is not going to be a boring book,” she said.
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Grendel creator Matt Wagner.
Comic book icon Matt Wagner is returning to his signature character, thanks in large part to a very smart woman.
Ahead of this year’s 25 anniversary of the first printing of Grendel, Wagner’s cult-favourite series, the writer/artist said he was inspired to revisit the character by his editor, and sister-in-law, Canadian-born Diana Schutz.
“She said ‘Look if it’s going to be something big for the anniversary, if it’s going to be a Grendel project, you have to draw it, not just write it — you really have to make it something special and put your mark on it’ and I said ‘yeah, absolutely,’” Wagner said in a telephone interview this week from his home outside Portland, Ore., ahead of a trip to Canada to attend the 5th annual Paradise Toronto Comicon (www.torontocomicon.com).
“And she said ‘and if it’s you drawing it, it should be Hunter Rose’ because that’s the one I’m associated with most artwork-wise and I said ‘yeah, you’re right.’”
“And she said ‘and if it’s going to be a Hunter Rose story, it’s got to be something important, it can’t just be a caper’ and I said ‘oh, shit, I already told all his important stuff.’”
Then the wheels started turning, Wagner said.
“I found a narrative loophole and kernel of an idea and before too long it was a full-blown story.”
If you’re not yet familiar with Grendel — a generations-spanning epic containing multiple protagonists all taking on the same name in the pursuit of things like money, power and revenge — Dark Horse Comics is hoping you soon will be.
In addition to this new miniseries, Grendel: Behold The Devil, the publisher recently released a 25th anniversary hardcover edition of Grendel: Devil By The Deed, Wagner’s first complete Grendel tale, and is soon to deliver Grendel Archives, the first-ever reprinting of Wagner’s first four Grendel stories from 1982 and the deluxe Art Of Grendel hardcover, featuring work by dozens of renowned creators.
What’s made Grendel last so long is how eclectic it has been, Wagner said.
“The key to Grendel’s success has been my willingness to continually reinvent it, to never think it was all done, to never think I’ve said all there was to be said,” he said.
“I had no original plans to keep it rolling on. I had no inkling that there were going to be other versions of Grendel, but once I started down that road I realized what a wide-open path that it was and never looked back.”
While it has been a long time since he’s written stories featuring Hunter Rose, Wagner said it took no time to get back into the groove.
“It’s incredibly natural,” he said. “There’s just something about coming back to Grendel that’s like speaking a language I was born to.”
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Cecil Castellucci
She already had two novels published and was working on a third, but Cecil Castellucci was forced to learn how to write all over again for her latest project.
The 37-year-old former Montrealer, now living in Los Angeles, is the author of The Plain Janes, the first book from DC Comics’ new Minx imprint — graphic novels aimed primarily at young, female readers.
Figuring out how to go from her successful experiences penning young adult novels like Boyproof and The Queen Of Cool to the sequential storytelling of comics was a thrill, but took some getting used to, Castellucci admits.
“It was totally exciting because I love writing and I love telling stories and I like telling them in many, many different ways,” she said in a telephone interview from L.A. this week.
“It was difficult to figure out at first how to move the action forward with panels. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I was completely overwhelmed.
“But (artist) Jim Rugg really had my back and he drew the first seven pages from the first seven pages of script that I’d written and once I saw those pages and I saw how my words could be translated into a picture, then I began to understand how move the action forward.”
The novel centres around four teenaged girls named Jane who find friendship as they undertake a guerrilla art project that turns their whole community on its ear.
“It’s about the reject table at lunch and trying to find beauty in the world and trying to make friends with people who are being true to themselves,” Castellucci said.
“I think everybody feels like they were a misfit in high school a little bit, even the popular kids, and so I think that everyone will find a bit of themselves in one of the many characters in there.”
Helping to launch the Minx line and to produce stories that will hopefully get more young girls reading comics is exciting, the author said, but she doesn’t necessarily want The Plain Janes labeled as a ‘girl book’.
“I always think it’s silly when we say ‘this is specifically a girl book’ or ‘this is specifically a boy book,’” Castellucci said. “People like a good story.”
As for whether this was a one-time thing or a life-changing experience…?
“I loved working on The Plain Janes, I loved working with Jim Rugg, I loved working with (editor) Shelly Bond” the author said.
“It was an awesome, awesome experience and I’m chomping at the bit to do another comic book or graphic novel.”
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Mike Mignola has got quite the little empire going.
The creator of Hellboy has not only reached legendary status in the comics world, but his character’s leap to the big screen with 2004’s theatrical success and an upcoming Hellboy animated special have helped land him the status of pop-culture icon.
Ahead of his appearance as a guest at the 11th annual Fan Expo Canada (www.fanexpocanada.com) in Toronto from Sept. 1-3, Mignola took some time to talk all things Hellboy and beyond with JPK.
JPK: What do you think about having Hellboy as an animated character?
MM: “I think it’s great. It’s certainly nothing I ever expected, but then that’s the case of so much with Hellboy.
“It was fun to create sort of a third version of Hellboy. If you think of the live-action version as being the second version, this is the third.
“In a way, the animated version falls in between the other two. It’s pretty faithful to the comic, but there are a couple of subtle differences that separate it from both the movie and the comic.
“I’m really happy with what I’ve seen, so far.”
JPK: How is work progressing on Hellboy 2?
MM: “It has bounced around a bit, but it seems like it’s settled down into Universal doing it. I expect we’ll be starting pre-production her e in the next month or so.”
JPK: What kind of involvement are you going to have with this project?
MM: “On both the animated thing and on the movies, I’ve had kind of the same role where I kind of co-plotted the stories. Shortly after Hellboy 1 came out, Guillermo and I sat down and came up with an original story for Hellboy 2 and then he went and wrote the screenplay.
“Once we start pre-production I’ve be involved in doing some of the design stuff and working with other designers — very much what I did in the first picture.”
JPK: How excited are you about seeing Hellboy back on the big screen?
MM: “I would love it. The animation thing is fun, but the live action is just such an interesting process. Animation is kind of like drawing and I think ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that.’ The live-action thing, the idea of designing these characters and designing these things that then actually have to be built and you have to use actors — it’s so different than anything I usually do. It’s really a fun process.”
JPK: Are there going to be any ties from the plot of your books to the second movie?
MM: “The second film kind of reflects the direction the comic is going now, while the first film covered Hellboy’s origin story which has the Nazis and Rasputin and the Lovecraftian creature stuff.
“One thing that’s always been a feature in Hellboy is the kind of fairy-tale, folklore, old-world mythology stuff — none of which was in the first film. This film has all that stuff.”
JPK: When can readers expect your next Hellboy comic: Darkness Calls?
MM: “Darkness Calls has actually been bumped back. I think right now it’s looking like February.
“We had a changeover with artists and that put us back to square one.”
JPK: What’s the experience like for you to hand over the art duties for the first time on a main Hellboy project?
MM: “I’ve got to say it’s a little awkward because Hellboy, unlike B.P.R.D. and other things, is so close to my heart.
“I originally thought up this story, thinking I would draw it. By the time I actually got down to writing it, I knew that someone else would be drawing it. But it’s still dealing with images and ideas that I’ve had banging around for a lot of years. It’s strange to hand over certain things to other people and say “I was going to draw it this way.’ I can either drive this guy crazy trying to get him to read my mind or I can step back and say ‘I trust you’, which in the case of Duncan (Fegredo), I do.
“For the most part I think Duncan is doing a better job then I ever would have done with the material. You get a richness and a detail in Duncan’s work that just isn’t what I do anymore.”
JPK: Your next Hellboy art project is set for this fall’s Dark Horse Book Of Monsters. Do you have any Hellboy art projects planned for after that?
MM: “I will draw things in the future. I think because I’m trying to do so many different things, at least for the foreseeable future, my art involvement will be small.
“At the end of the latest B.P.R.D. series, I stepped in and drew the last five pages of the series. It was a special moment in the book. I think as Hellboy goes on there will be places where I’ll want to step in and do some special moments.
“There are a couple of stories I do want to do someday, but right now my focus is on keeping the Hellboy stuff going with Duncan, keeping the B.P.R.D. stuff going with John Arcudi and Guy Davis and I’m also writing an Abe Sapien miniseries and a Lobster Johnson miniseries and I’m co-writing a novel right now that I’m also illustrating — I’ve got a lot of stuff.
“I’ve also got a lot of non-Hellboy stories and art projects that I want to do.
“I’ve got a billion things to do. If I sat down and tried to draw a Hellboy thing of any length, it would just never get done and I don’t want to get in the way of expanding all this stuff.”
JPK: You’ve just finished up a three-issue writing arc on Conan. Do you have any appetite to work with any other company’s established characters?
MM: “Not at all. There are a couple of characters it would be fun to draw once, but I can’t imagine doing that stuff because now I’m so used to doing my own thing.”
JPK: Looking ahead to Fan Expo Canada 2006, do you enjoy getting out and meeting your ...
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