Carpe Noctem Interviews, Vol 3

by Carnell, Thom

  I also notice the King Tut photograph hanging on the wall.

  Oh, yeah…there’s a lot of crap like that in there. I don’t even have that stuff in front of me. I could point out a billion different little things, like so many people from DC marketing and all of these different people who I’ve gotten to know over the years who wanted to be in it. It became this big joke that I was sticking in so many cameos of real people into my stuff that I just carried it through to the most absurd level with the epilogue. For me, that’s it, that’s my swan song. I am not doing that with every project that I do.

  Did anyone feel slighted because they weren’t included?

  Sure! …egotistical bastards. I hear this all of the time from certain friends of mine, who pose as some of my main characters, would tell me. It’s like you have to realize that some of these guys take great offense that you don’t ask them, that you ask some people but you don’t ask others. Oh, geez… Whatta pain in the ass.

  It’ll be a sign that they’ve ‘arrived,’ being in an Alex Ross book.

  Or, in some cases, what it meant to this old ex-girlfriend of mine was that, depending upon who you are being used for, it’s sort of an estimation as to whether or not you yourself could be considered as a heroic ideal, especially if you’re turned into a super hero, are your features handsome enough? It’s an acknowledgement of you being an attractive person. It just gets to be stupid. The people who posed for me for the main characters, honestly, could have cared less. This wasn’t that big of an ego trip for them. They’re doing me a favor, but it wasn’t like they were canvassing to be certain characters. I guess there’s other people who really wanted to be… I had an ex-girlfriend who, literally, wanted to be Wonder Woman. Well, I’m sorry, you’re not Wonder Woman.

  ‘You don’t fit the suit.’

  The girl who posed as Wonder Woman, she doesn’t look like that, not really, but she was the good base that I built the structure upon.

  Now, with Kingdom Come, you’ve knocked off the majority of DC’s characters. Are there any other characters you’re just dying to do?

  Well, just in that statement alone, you can see what was one of the missing characters in Kingdom Come that’s from all of DC’s sixty year history, one of them was Uncle Sam. I included all of the various Freedom Fighters and, basically all of those Quality Comics characters, why did I not have him in there? I wouldn’t just skip him.

  You had plans…

  I had plans, exactly. My idea for Uncle Sam was not to do him related to a super hero product. It wasn’t to have anything to do with his previous incarnations. It was a whole angle on doing something that was completely its own animal and, of course, that’s the project I’ve been working on. I also wanted to get away from what people had conceived of me as constantly doing, that I was, in no way, a one trick pony. With the rest of the DC characters, I do have plans to get back and do something with the individual main stars like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. I want to do work with each one of those guys individually, but as far as a lot of the other figures, I kind of said what I wanted to say and, ultimately, I’m fortunate in a weird way that the characters look so different now. In a way that I don’t care for them. I don’t want to draw the ‘fish hook’ Aquaman. I don’t want to draw the goofy masked Green Lantern. I don’t like my Flash with chrome. I don’t care to draw these modern versions of these characters. I’m perfectly content with the fact that I said what I wanted to say there and unless you can give me an opportunity to draw Hal Jordan and Berry Allen, I don’t need to cover that.

  In the past, I have asked several comic writers and artists what work being done now they respected and your name continually came up.

  It’s too weird…

  I just talked to Joe Jusko and he made a specific point to say, ‘Alex is the guy.’

  [laughing]

  Two questions on that. Number one, is that weird for you? Number two, whose work do you consider to be, as a friend of mine says, ‘the shit’?

  I’ll tell you who the shit is. The shit is, and there’s a lot of people that are great and I don’t mean to short change a lot of people I could mention who are really phenomenal artists, because there certainly are a lot of guys doing mainstream comic stuff that I’ve all the respect in the world for, but if I’m going to take the time to mention anybody specific, I always make sure it’s the same two guys. Both are Chicagoans strangely enough, but that has nothing to do with it, I swear. One of them is Chris Ware from ACME Novelty Library. His stuff is easily the most innovative work within comics. It’s not so much inspiring to me as a figure drawing draftsman, because his style is cartoony, it’s pen and ink, and it’s more detail-oriented than even my stuff. I mean, it’s basically he’s doing new work with comics that completely blows away 99% of everything that’s out there. I mean, he’s taking things to a further level than any other individual creator who’s doing it all on his own. He’s the serving example that the medium has possibilities beyond what we’ve explored already, beyond what we’ve done with it, least of all what I’ve done. Ultimately, all I’ve done, I feel, is to just do a big budget movie within the confines of what already works in comics. Super heroes sell so I haven’t introduced anything new there. Realistic art has to work, if you do it well enough, because live action movies sell in huge numbers, why wouldn’t realistic illustrations of the same thing? I don’t really have any innovations on my side. Chris Ware is the innovative force in comics today, the principal one. There’s many others but he’s top of my list. He really blows me away. The other person I would want to mention is Gary Gianni. He’s been mentioned in your magazine, I noticed that. He’s my boy. He completely blows me away. For one thing, why does he want to have anything to do with comics? Being an illustrator who can do that early twentieth century pen and ink style that is just so phenomenal expenditure of energy for him. I can’t believe that anybody has that kind of skill today. It completely knocks me on my ass. I have a great appreciation for good pen and ink work and he is the finest that I can think of that’s out there, nobody’s finer. I’ve seen the way Gary works. I’ve gotten to know Gary real well and become friends with him. He’s also an excellent gentleman, too. He’ll be in Uncle Sam. [Laughs] It’ll be a chance to finally see Gary Gianni in Uncle Sam. His work on The Shadow was the definitive Shadow for me, nobody’s done him finer. No offense to Kaluta, but I’m sorry, Gary is the shit. I look at stuff like that and I think, ‘Man, that’s really different than the norm.’ What I do, I think that there’s a number of guys who have been working in a similar vein for a while. It’s just that I’ve been handed the reins of being the painted artist in comics. It seems like everybody who comes to me with this attitude that I invented painted comics has forgotten everybody who preceded me including Joe Jusko. Everybody from Dave McKean to Bill Sienkewicz to Jon Muth, they’re all like ‘Phfft!’ I’m like, ‘Wait a minute! Those guys didn’t do painted comics? Oh wait a minute, they didn’t do super hero comics, and that’s the key.'

  And even when they did, that seems to get forgotten. I mean look at Havok & Wolverine…

  Exactly. Look at Daredevil, Elektra, Black Orchid, or Arkham Asylum, all of those things preceded my work, and I still feel very intimidated by what they accomplished there. I think that a great many things that those artists accomplished are far and above things that I’ve done and I think that their brilliance as illustrators far exceeds mine. The difference is, basically, I have a very understandable style to the masses. I don’t have a very modern art-oriented background. So I don’t have a lot of illustrative techniques that influence my work. Pretty much, everything is real straightforward. If you took a pulp novel cover artist and had him draw the entire story instead of just doing the cover, that’s all that I am. I’m trying to be more than that in the end, but, ultimately, that’s what makes me accessible to more people. It’s a shame that these people who think of themselves as so knowledgeable about comics completely overshadow these guys in
favor of me continually. It does me a lot of good in terms of my career, but it’s like I’ve been handed the paint brush for the entire medium. It’s like, ‘Alex Ross is the painter guy and he’s the only one.’ Especially in the case of Joe, Joe preceded Marvels with his trading card set which was the first notable set of illustrations that anyone had done of the Marvel characters, let alone a huge number of super heroes that nobody had seen painted before, but because it was trading cards and because it wasn’t storytelling, it is, most often, overlooked in favor of what happened with Marvels. Then again, everything that preceded my work on Marvels and Kingdom Come was pretty much single character focused stuff and, a lot of times, it was a character that wasn’t brightly clad. It would be like Batman. It’s like Havok and Wolverine, they were out of costume throughout most of the story which makes it a lot easier to make it more believable, more appropriate to the styles of Kent Williams and Jon Muth. They were not into the big colorful costumed character. I don’t think they had interest in painting Superman, but it was the fact that the groundwork that they laid down, the fact that they didn’t themselves illustrate those brightly clad characters is what inspired me all the more to do what I did because I figured they’d left this gaping hole. Why didn’t they do it? Because it wasn’t in their interest, it wasn’t in their style to do that kind of thing. For me, I could see very easily doing that kind of thing, but I wanted to impress [upon] the reader that these things were plausible, that these things were living and breathing and just as serious as the work that these guys had done with those other characters. Again, I should owe a certain amount of thanks and inspiration to them for the fact that what they didn’t cover is what left this void open for me to come in and fill.

  Uncle Sam… Tell me a little bit about it.

  It’s kind of like a political comic book or actually a social commentary comic book, [in whimsical voice] a comic book for our times. It’s basically using the character, the icon of Uncle Sam, as a vehicle for the state of the spirit of our nation today. Given that our spirit is very poor, so is the symbol of America which means that Uncle Sam is a bum in this series. He’s basically lying face down in the gutter. He’s wandering around, barely remembering who he is. He experiences flashbacks, (as any war veteran would, of any period in his own history, which would be all of our history) that freak him out. It’s sort of like a journey of self-realization for this icon and it’s all a big metaphor for, what we as a country, need to do. If we, as a country, realize that we are not all we protest ourselves to be, that we do have these huge holes in our coat, that we are, in fact, in many ways, more than poor of spirit, we are poor in many places that we don’t even want to look. We have swept a lot of things under the carpet. I don’t want to say that Uncle Sam is about shame, but we need to have a certain amount of shame. Self-realization does not mean shame. It means coming to terms with your stuff. If you’re responsible for something, you should come clean. America is not known for coming clean. We are used to hiring liars as our presidents. We’re used to putting people in power who inspire us because they hand us even bigger bullshit than we have before. I’m the kind of person who gets inspired by someone who comes in who just wants to tell us everything is fuckin’ wrong. I was a big Jerry Brown supporter. I totally flipped when he was goin’ on about how the country is completely fucked. I don’t mean to say that this series is going to be all about how we need to overthrow the government. No! No! No! We just need to look in the fuckin’ mirror, that’s all. Not just have a big fuckin’ dick about ourselves like we’re all the shit. We’re not. There are quite probably countries in the world that have a better social and economic system than we do. We just don’t want to look at that fact. I mean, I get into this argument with people sometimes where it’s like, ‘Well, better here than anywhere else.’ Well, you don’t know that. You don’t fuckin’ know that, that’s bullshit. There’s places in the world that, if you visit them, you’d be stunned at thinking, ’But, I have to get back to America because I’m part of that consumer culture.’ Without our TV and our mass media and our mass consumption here, we are hooked on it. We are all addicts in this country of the lifestyle and what it is to be an American and it’s completely tied to the capitalistic aspect of it, being a consumer and all of that. There’s other ways you can live, but the greatest thing of what it was to be America, and what is in the book, is that the greatest thing that Uncle Sam himself might epitomize is the spirit of freedom as a nation. If America fails as an experiment in being that spirit of freedom as a nation, then who else is out there to pick up the torch? I think that America could still be that spirit of freedom. In some ways, freedom is not everything you wanted it to be. Maybe that is exactly what we have in certain ways right now. We have too much freedom and it scares us. I’m not, of course, thinking or mentioning all of the oppressing factors that we have as a country, but, in any case, that’s what makes the character special because who else could compete as a country in terms of the ideals of liberty and freedom being fully applied to every aspect of our lives. Well, maybe Iceland, actually… You kind of get my drift. So, in a nutshell that’s the big meaning behind Uncle Sam, and as far as what it means to me as an artist, it’s an endeavor to show that I’m not a one trick pony in terms of ‘I can only do non-real worlds and that I have to live in some kind of delicate fantasy land of big bosomed men and women, big bosomed figures that run around in scantily clad costumes.’ That is a wonderful playland to go in and use the toys of those companies or those genres to play with. I feel like if I am going to be able to go back and do anything valuable with the super hero genre, I have to show that I am also understanding the real world more and I’m bringing in a strong sense of that, because that can only help to strengthen the fiction of any other genre. Ultimately, all Sam is, is using the real world fictions and non-fictions. Uncle Sam is a symbol and we use him as a symbol. He may be a moving, living, breathing symbol in our story, but it’s purely a metaphorical tale. He’s as real as he needs to be. The fact that his story happens on paper in the Uncle Sam project is as real as it needs to be. It is as real as the question of what it is in the real world. Then again, it is a slanted point of view. [Laughs] I made this comment in the Wizard article that you might have noticed that I said it was ‘a preachy book.’ I have gotten my balls busted so much from the writer and the editors over that. They flipped when they saw that. ‘Why would you say that? People are going to be thinking this or that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, fuckin’ relax!’ The thing is, given everything I’ve just told you, can you tell that people are going to perceive this as a preachy book? Fuck, yeah! We’re going to get our asses handed to us on this thing, because it does have so much of a fire to it. It’s not going to be what people would have expected from me.

  Ok, after Uncle Sam hits the streets, where does Alex Ross go from there?

  I haven’t got my next project completely, formally pitched or confirmed. I have a strong feeling that when I put together the idea of the Superman graphic novel that I’d like to do, there is a good possibility of something going on there. The exact form it’s going to take is unsure, but even that is intended to be a different kind of approach in terms of formatting. I want to do an oversized format. Initially, I wanted to do something that would work as both a children’s book and a mainstream comic and be released in both markets. So, trying to work out that concept is the logistical nightmare I’ve got before me and it might also endeavor to be, possibly, my first writing experience or it might simply be something where I completely plot it and someone scripts it. It could be any of a number of possibilities. Or, maybe I’ll never get to do it, you never know. DC might tell me to go fuck myself. It’s been known to happen. So, there are other things I wish to do. I want to do some sculpting. I want to do a sculpture of Superman at some point. I want to flex some other muscles. I’d like to do some cartooning. I’d like to draw in the Superman animated style, just on a lark. Just to do for a quick one issue thing because I think that stuff
is so much fun. It’s totally different that what I normally do. It’s not that I find what I normally do to be boring anymore, it’s just that you have to keep varying some things. By doing Uncle Sam, the next time I do super heroes again, it will be that much richer. Same thing of art style, in and of itself, spending time either sculpting or working in another style all together. It’ll be enriching me as an artist in many, many ways.

  Brian Pulido

  I’d known Brian Pulido for years from going to conventions. Chaos! Comics' presence at the time was HUGE. Big displays, loud rock-n-roll, and some very enigmatic personnel made their both a must-see at every con. The thing was… that not only did Chaos! have things covered creatively, but Brian was someone who obviously had a keen business sense and had a plan where a lot of people in the comics biz… did not. My memory of this interview was that it was done via telephone with Brian being driven around Los Angeles in a limousine and hearing him stop at a fast food drive-thru to order food. Over the years, Brian’s moved on to filmmaking and, by all accounts, he’s done pretty well for himself. This makes me happy…

  "Riding The Firey Horses Of The Apocalypse"

  “Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to reinvent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.