ZED Presents…
The Carpe Noctem Interviews: Vol. 3
Conducted by Thom Carnell
Edited by C.K. Burch
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2012 by Thom Carnell & ZED Presents
Cover photo by Nicole K. Brandon
www.gakphotography.com
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Thom Carnell is a writer whose fiction has been featured in SWANK Magazine, in CARPE NOCTEM Magazine, and in the horror anthology, BLOODY CARNIVAL from Pill Hill Press. His novel, NO FLESH SHALL BE SPARED, and collections of his interviews (under the title THE CARPE NOCTEM INTERVIEWS…) are available here at Crossroad Press. He is a journalist for FANGORIA Magazine, Dread Central.com, & Twitchfilm.com as well as a Senior Programmer / Panelist for Seattle’s ZomBCon & Crypticon. He is a graduate of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, a certified eye enucleist, and a Registered Polysomnographic Technologist. His website is located at: http://thomcarnell.com.
Book List
No Flesh Shall Be Spared
The Carpe Noctem Interviews: Vol. 1
The Carpe Noctem Interviews: Vol. 2
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Contents
Alex Ross
Brian Pulido
David Mack
Diamanda Galas
Jhonen Vasquez
Screaming Mad George
Tom Savini
Tim Cridland
Jon J Muth
Cliff Nielsen
Joe Jusko
Klay Scott
Introduction
I dropped out of film school. Then I dropped out of art school. Not because I’m necessarily unintelligent or undisciplined but more because even then I knew exactly what I liked and didn’t want to waste any time exploring anything that didn’t serve my immediate interests. In other words, I was immature.
So there I was, broke, a two time college drop-out who worshiped horror movies and — this is before digital video made it possible for a hobo to make a film — no money to make any sort of cinema. But I DID have recording equipment — crude, analog stuff — some keyboards, guitars and a strong desire to make dark, abstract art. So I started making music, weird stuff inspired by mid-period Skinny Puppy, Swans and ambient artists like Aphex Twin and film scores by Italian greats like Frizzi and Simonetti. I started a “band” called The Walls of Jericho. We raided the Salvation Army for doll parts and curtains and lights and made a really great dumpster bin stage show. I recorded the music on a reel-to-reel 2-track and transferred it to cassette tape. I took photos and cut and pasted art and photocopied covers. I hand cut those covers and hand cut tape labels and glued them on the cassettes. It was cheap as all hell and the music — though I marketed it through Goth circles (my scene back then) in Toronto — was pretty unclassifiable. I had a really hard time getting people to care.
But when they did care, they really cared. So I had ENOUGH interest in the work to encourage me to continue. I mailed dozens of cassettes around the world in hopes I’d get a review or be picked up by a label. I did get some great fanzine reviews, the odd wretched one (my old Rue Morgue colleague Liisa Ladouceur had a fanzine at the time called The Ninth Wave that I loved and I was crushed to find a review on my work in her pages labeled “fromage”) and in the case of Carpe Noctem... I got nuthin.
I picked Carpe Noctem up at Tower Records in Toronto (now long gone) and loved its glossy, intelligent sexiness. They had an extensive review section of work both indie and pro and I prayed I’d find words on The Walls of Jericho in there. I never did. Many of my contemporaries did, like Mara’s Torment, a project I played with often. But no one wanted to talk about my little cheap photocopied noise experiments…sigh.
But I kept picking up Carpe Noctem. Ate it up. And I was hopeful that ONE day my name would be in print and I might gain a fan or two from the other dark disciples who thrilled to its pages.
And though that dream never materialized, fate is a funny fucker. Thom Carnell writes for — among other outlets — Fangoria. Suddenly I’m the editor of Fangoria. Catía, his lovely wife, is a friend. And we can all laugh about our shared missed history together as we collectively walk the same path to our respective futures. As an editor who is sent all manner of hopeful crap to review, most of it I shove in a drawer, I get it now.
So this one’s for all the rejected artists. NEVER give up your dreams. And when your heroes fail to facilitate that dream, never, ever take it personally.
~Chris Alexander
Alex Ross
Since we first began the magazine, I’d wanted to talk to Alex Ross. His paintings were always ones I sought out and when I’d hear of a new one, I’d scour the comic shops and lithograph shops just to see it. After years of being a fan from afar, the chance to talk to Alex presented itself and I jumped at the opportunity. Seconds into talking, I knew the wait had been worth it. Alex was incredibly frank and I think his responses show an artist clearly operating at a higher level than most. A good guy… and an interview I still hold up as one of my best.
“Seven Angels Which Stood Before God…”
In a medium long known for its simplistic graphics, Alex Ross is something of an enigma. His work is wholly based in the ‘real,’ yet his subject matter is that of super heroes and lands unimagined. The quality of his paintings is so photo-realistic that whoever reads the books he has worked on begins to question whether they are paintings at all. When you look at an Alex Ross painting, there is no doubt as to who the artist is. Everything looks real, down to the faces of the people in crowd scenes. Each person has a distinct personality. The first I ever heard of Alex was as a result of his work on the book, Marvels. I still remember the cover. It was a simple hand balled into a fist and engulfed in flame, the Human Torch. However, the sensibility displayed was amazing. This hand displayed real emotion by the almost obsessive eye for detail used to create it. It was soon after, that DC Comics released the awe-inspiring Kingdom Come. This tale of redemption and destruction used as its characters some of the most famous icons of the comic industry: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. As I leafed though the book, my eye became drunk on the multitude of lush, beautiful images and intricate storytelling. I was hooked. Now, with the sure-to-be-controversial Uncle Sam, Alex Ross has crafted a cautionary allegory that questions our country’s self image, its past and its destiny. The future looks bright for Alex Ross. His ability to forge subtle and beautiful images which work hand-in-glove with the accompanying story already knocked the comics’ industry right on its collective ear. Now, it’s your turn...
~*~
Let’s start at the beginning: when you were a little kid, did you always want to grow up and be the legendary comic artist that you are?
Yes. Next question.
Oh, don’t do that to me! I mean, were you always the kid carrying the sketchpad…
Well, not specifically any of those things. I was never a sketch book kind of kid, but, certainly, I was regarded as an artist from the time I wa
s young because I was always drawing whatever or doing artistic projects of some type, whether it be illustrations, or some kind of object making of some sort.
Have you ever attended art school?
Yeah, I went to an art school in Chicago called the American Academy of Art.
How was that for you?
That was great. It was the same school my mother attended back in 1945. It’s sort of a family tradition. It’s a short two-year program that I took for illustration. I could have taken a longer program for fine art or whatever, but it was very intensive, just a lot of periods of sitting there drawing from models and painting from models. Every day you’re drawing for several hours.
Did I hear you right, you say that your mother is an artist? Is your father as well?
No. My father’s a minister.
In looking over the body of your work, there is so much detail, down to the point of crowd scenes where you have individual faces, real people inhabiting your paintings. You have to question just how out of control your compulsive tendencies are. How would you respond to this?
[Laughs] I need help. I need desperate help. Anyone out there who can help me, please… My compulsive tendencies are way out of whack.
It just seems that every single person, every single thing just has this sense of realism to it, like these people really exist.
Uh…well…
What, are you yawning? [laughs]
[laughs] That’s certainly what I’m shooting for. Boy, what can I say? I’m trying to make everything seem like it was done on the biggest budget possible. ‘We spared no expense.’ Everything is in there, every possible detail. It makes me think of the kind of films I really appreciate where they have a cast of thousands. It really feels like you’re getting a sense of the entire world within that one film. You are seeing a whole breadth of humanity appear in something, not just a small cast of ten people. The fact that everybody is individualized, well… A lot of times, that’s just made up, that’s just me painting things out of my head and many times it is referenced. A lot of times it’s specifically just to keep me awake, really. It’s not that it’s such a big deal for me artistically that I need to conquer having everybody look so specific to themselves. It’s like I feel that for the amount of detail that I put into other aspects of the story where I want to go really crazy and get it as tight as possible that I’m not going to be able to blow off the things that might seem boring by comparison. So, I have to go that further mile for that. I have to try to find some way to keep that interesting and alive. That’s why reference makes a big difference there, because anything that can show me a certain way it could be done, a certain option, a person’s face or a certain background, that way I can stay alert. I can actually get the job done and stay inspired even to the most boring, minute detail.
So, growing up who were the biggies for you? Who were the guys who you couldn’t wait to read the latest issues?
Well, for most of my youth I didn’t have that experience of being able to get stuff on a weekly basis. I wasn’t perfectly aware of when the next week’s comics were shipping until I was eleven or twelve when I finally discovered… Actually, it wasn’t until the early eighties that I ran across the comic book store that was basically a comic book store, or I should say it wasn’t until the early eighties that comic book stores became a big part of this industry, or it became the industry all together. So, some people had a connection to a local store they would go to and look through the comic racks or whatever. Anyway, the artists… Bernie Wrightson was the guy who influenced me probably more than anybody else, not that I was getting a lot of it or that there was that much of his work to get. I saw [Swamp Thing] probably when I was eight and that was ‘78, so that puts his comic out in ‘73, I think, somewhere around there. In any case, when I saw his comic I thought, ‘My god, this is the most realistic artwork I’ve ever seen for a comic book.’ I couldn’t believe it and that one always stuck with me. As far as people I was always collecting, on the other side of my brain, I was always getting George Perez. I loved Perez. I wanted to draw the same kinds of multitudes of characters that Perez would do. There was so much charm in the idea that any time he would touch a certain character, it would have that Perez look. That was so much what I wanted, that same kind of figure style he would bring to it or the beauty of his rendering was always really entrancing to me. Other people like Romita and Kirby I appreciated at the time, but these are the big guys who were contemporary artists of my time that I paid attention to.
Hmm…those were not two names I would have ventured to guess…
But, then again, it’s not like there were any big examples of painted artists or ultra-realistic artists when I was growing up. As a very young kid, I didn’t have a lot of the different comics to expose me to all those different styles. I had this one book, The History of Comic Books in America, by Les Daniels and that showed me a breadth of what was available and what had been done before. In the early eighties, I started to see the stuff that Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated had done which involved some painted and some more detail-exhaustive kind of comics, but, ultimately, it was the field of super heroes that still held me. And so, no matter how much of those other examples existed, it was still the field of super heroes that was always going to pull me back in.
Let me ask you a little about the comics industry in general. Number one, what drew you to it? Number two, if you had to venture a guess, what do you think is the genesis of their current problems, and where do you think that lies?
[Audible snickering]
Hey you, stop that laughing!
They’re gettin’ everything they deserve now. I got into comics figuring I would want to do this my whole life. I didn’t have the full perception of the pitfalls or strengths of the field. I figured that comics were a strong field, would always be a strong field, but I didn’t think it was the kind of thing that would get me rich or necessarily famous in a way that you would think of as an impressive thing. I have a friend who does comics, or did comics I should say. He was one of the people who kind of got shoved out in the last few years. He told me that his inspiration for being a comic artist was based upon seeing the film How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. For anybody who hasn’t seen it, it’s about a comic strip artist who is this phenomenally wealthy or successful bachelor who lives in this wonderful penthouse in New York City. That is the most incredible thing in the world. He’s got a butler. He’s got this. He’s got that. He runs around with his models play acting out his comic which his butler then photographs for him to work by (which is strange how that parallels what I have to do), but it looked as if he was just enjoying the good life and, of course, women loved him and he was the biggest thing since sliced bread. Once I saw this film and I realized that this was this guy’s inspiration, I couldn’t believe it because it was so completely removed from any thought I ever had of what somebody could see and the benefit of being a comic book artist. I definitely didn’t think that comics led to chicks. I knew that was one thing going in. I never saw girls appreciate comics. I always wanted to help to increase reader appreciation on the female side for comics, but I didn’t expect that you would have figures like Neil Gaiman or anybody else who was giving this sense that you could get laid from being a comic book artist or that there was a lot of money to be had. I figured that people like Romita and Perez and all those guys enjoyed their lives because they got to do work that they loved and that was the most I was aspiring to. As far as anything else about the business, what I knew of it, I really can’t say that I knew other than the fact that the seventies was a slow time and it seems like things had just been getting better and better all through the eighties, at least that was my perception of it. At the time I entered comics, I had a complete faith in the medium and where it was going and that it was going to continue to impress people. It was part of a long running objective, I figured, to convince the rest of the world how cool it was. It was this pure objective. ‘Someday, we’re going t
o do it!’ I wanted to be a part of it. It was something to fight for. Then, when things went crazy, when the collector craze happened, I knew instinctively that something was very, very wrong, because suddenly comics were being treated as stocks and little kids were being turned into little junior stock market watchers. This isn’t what you do with an entertainment medium that was mostly regarded for children. It’s just way, way off of any part of the objectives of this industry. At this point, everybody was climbing on board because they were glad to be making big bowlfuls of money for the first time ever. Everybody, when times were good, took advantage to the point where they really whored the audience that they had. They drove more people away from comics than they really brought in. It seemed like no excess was too much excess at the time in a way that you would publish this certain kind of thing. There are obviously all of those examples of either the covers or the number ones that they would come up with, anything to get a collector response of buying something. I would always tell people that I didn’t think that the average person who was coming in as a speculator would still buy any of this stuff. It was just that they were selling all of these new books to all the same people. Those same people were just buying multiple copies of it and, obviously, it was on a really short lifespan. I didn’t want to turn out to be right, but, of course, that’s what happened, everything blew up in everyone’s face. I’m amazed that people squeal about how badly it turned out. Of course it turned out this badly. It was fated to blow up in everyone’s faces. It seems as if those boom markets will do that. Everyone jumps on board and then the bottom falls out. Right now, it’s actually transferred over to toys, that’s the weird thing about it. I didn’t even realize that it could do it so quickly and easily. There is that same collector mentality happening over there and I was thinking, ‘Geez, don’t all the people who just got out of comics, don’t they not have any money anymore? Didn’t they pretty much wipe themselves out?’ Where do they have all the cash for these damn toys that are the same damn thing? ‘Let’s put a different [suit] on Batman and sell fifty thousand more versions of it.’ Nobody is a bigger pimp than George Lucas, he’d sell your children.
Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3 Page 1