Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are so many versions of Batman that I love so much from different artists that I had to almost stop trying to draw those versions and get past that and just draw the Jeff Lemire version of Batman eventually.
People like Superman, The Flash - they just feel limited in who they are and what you can do with them because everyone knows who they are and what they do. Someone like Animal Man feels very open to interpretation.
Specifically, in Canada, the First Nations are often overlooked in pop culture or in general, and when things are reported about our First Nations, it's often negative things - about the hardships they face and what-not.
'Plutona' is the story of five kids who find the body of the world's greatest superhero in the woods after school one day. It's about how this discovery, and the decisions they make, affect them as a group and individually.
I never - when I go into a project, I don't think too much about if there's a lot of other sci-fi books out there or horror books or whatever. I just tell the stories I want to tell, and I think that is evident on the page.
'Bloodshot,' for me, was unlike anything I'd ever done before, which was really the draw of it. In addition to trying to reconnect with my earlier work, I also wanted to try to do something that was completely new and different.
We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.
I'm not a big fan of introducing a bunch of new mysteries into a story without really knowing where they're going because you just end up struggling at the end to make sense of them and make it all seem like you planned it all along.
Self-publishing worked for me. Being able to put your work in print, even if it's a tiny print-on-demand print run of a dozen or so copies, shows publishers and editors a completed piece of work and that you can follow through on a project.
The cool thing about 'Sweet Tooth' is that you can bring influences from the underground and alternative people that I read and also bring in some genre influences, too, from movies and comics. And kind of mash it all up. It's a fun project.
I enjoyed my time at DC. Dan Didio, Geoff Johns and Jim Lee were great to me, and I'm very grateful for the opportunities they gave me. Having said that, I think it's important to try new things and work with new people to keep myself fresh.
When you're a kid, you're not as corrupted by the world at large. You're not corrupted by prejudices. You're much more open-minded. Much more interested in the world around you. 'Sweet Tooth' is about the world returning to that kind of place.
I think when science fiction is at its worst, it's just spaceships flying around shooting at each other. There has to be a lot more going on than that... science fiction is about exploring new worlds and new ideas, not about ray guns and action, necessarily.
When I'm doing the Justice League stuff, my point of view is always coming through Buddy. And he's a dad, and there's stuff about his life that I relate to with my life, and I can also take the abilities of animals, which a lot of people don't know about me.
In the case of 'Sweet Tooth,' and in the case of a lot of stuff I do, it all starts with the image. It may be something I sketch in my sketchbooks - something that reoccurs in the sketchbooks. Eventually, a character or story line starts to grow out of that.
The Green Arrow stuff that I've responded to from the past is the Mike Grell stuff. I've liked a lot of other stuff, but I think for me, the direction and the mood and the tone that I really want is something much darker and more aggressive and really fast-paced action.
There are so many books I love for different reasons. For superhero stuff, I always go back to Alan Moore's 'Watchmen' or his 'Swamp Thing' run. Those are my two favorites, and there are indie books that I really love, like Eddie Campbell's 'Alec' books and 'From Hell.'
To me, Green Arrow in the past, what people loved about Oliver Queen pre-New 52 was his relationships with other heroes. Like his friendship with Green Lantern, his animosity with Hawkman, his romance with Black Canary - these are all the things that sort of defined him.
I have always been drawn to young characters and seeing big tapestries through the eyes of a child. It probably comes from being a father myself and having a young son and seeing the world through his eyes. I write stories that are sort of the exaggerated version of that.
Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.
I have always loved telling stories about families. I love the idea of people who may not choose to be together, but are nonetheless bonded for life and forced to interact and develop these relationships. I love the tension throwing different types of people under one roof creates.
There's been Hollywood interest in a lot of the stuff that I've done, but Descender's felt different right from the start for whatever reason. I don't know if that's because a lot of my other stuff's a little more idiosyncratic, and 'Descender' has a bit more of a high concept to it.
I've been reading comics since I was four. I used to get them when I would go grocery shopping with my mom. I remember getting the digest versions of old DC comics. The one that I remember reading first was Paul Levitz' 'Justice Society of America' stuff that he was doing in the '70s.
When I was offered 'Hawkeye,' it was very intimidating at first because that book is so loved and so successful, commercially and critically. The worst thing you could do is try to imitate what they did because, in the end, you're just going to get a watered-down version of what they did.
The thing about Canada is that it's a very large country, and the population's very spread out among different regions. Each region in the country really has its own personality and its own culture, you know? From West Coast to East Coast - wherever you go, it's almost like it's its own country.
I can handle a lot of work. I've always been able to. I'm a very focused individual. I come to my studio at about 7:30 in the morning and exit almost 5:00 P.M. In that time, those eight or nine hours, it's kind of laser focus on whatever I'm working on. There aren't really any distractions or anything.
Sometimes, if you have a lot of history with a character and a lot of affection, it's hard for you to do anything with that character. Like with Swamp Thing, for instance, I revere the Alan Moore run so much that it would be hard for me to do my own Swamp Thing. I care too much about the way it was done before.
I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.
I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.
Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
It's not hard to look at our own world and draw parallels between 9/11, for example, and how Muslims are viewed or treated by North American culture since then. Just to see the way fear can breed hatred and intolerance for people who aren't the same as us - and that's certainly part of what's at the heart of 'Descender.'
I never really approach any project or story thinking of themes first or what a certain character 'represents.' Maybe other writers do, but for me, it just starts with the characters and a certain emotion I want to convey. It usually isn't until I get deeper into a book and look back a bit that I start to see the themes, etc.
I look at my son and his relationship to technology, and I think back to when I was six and how wildly different the world is in that regard. I see him using an iPhone and all this stuff, and then I think back to when I was six. We didn't even have computers in our houses at all yet. This is a huge gap between our experiences as children.