From TORI AMOS to IRON MAIDEN
How the SOUND OF COLLABORATION Brought Us Together
I’ve been a metalhead since I was thirteen, but even at that time I was very specific in my tastes. I didn’t care much for the popular stuff, the accessible stuff that seemed to be on the tips of every burnouts tongue. I was hooked on CHEZ 106.1 out of Ottawa who had a 3 hour metal show every Friday night from 9-12pm called POWER CHORDS. They played a lot of stuff from Europe as well as a bunch of indie metal. At thirteen, when we’re all seeking our identity in the world, it felt right as rain.
Just as a brief example of what I was listening to back then:
PILEDRIVER
GRAVEDIGGER
LOUDNESS
MALICE
EXCITER
MANOWAR
ACCEPT
LEIGE LORD
ZNOWHITE
OVERKILL...etc.
The thing of it was, I’d record stuff on my boom box as the songs were introduced. In most cases I was trying to hit RECORD while trying to remember who the band was. In some cases, I got it completely wrong. For years, I had no interest in METALLICA until I realized that some of my favorite stuff was off their first two albums. Even to this day, I have a thin skin for anything past Kill ‘em All and Ride the Lightning.
When it came to more popular bands like DOKKEN or MOTLEY CRUE I was a casual listener. Though RATT seemed to get through to me for some reason. Anyway, there were A LOT of bands to seek out and that was part of the fun. Sending away for catalogs in the back of KERRANG! magazine to find even more obscure music and t-shirts was as good as it got when it came to finding a means of expression.
One band in particular I never could wrap my head around was IRON MAIDEN. I loved the album covers, thought EDDIE their mascot was great, and even liked “Run to the Hills”, but Bruce Dickinson’s vocals always felt like he was singing through a sock. Like it was this quiet powerful voice...if that was even possible.
A few years ago, I was contacted by Z2 Comics editor Rantz Hoseley to see if I wanted to work with Bruce Dickinson on an Iron Maiden series. The pay was really good for indie comics...hell even for mainstream comics! Compared to my Marvel rate in 2009 it wasn’t too far off.
BACKSTORY: Rantz contacting me years ago to work on COMIC BOOK TATTOO, a Tori Amos anthology project. He had been friends with her and pitched a book that would use songs from her catalogue that people would write and illustrate. What was even cooler is I asked if my wife could write the story…and he said sure! As the years went on Rantz ended up becoming the editor at a music-based publisher called Z2 Comics.
He’d remembered working with me and offered up an interesting BEETHOVEN: The Final Symphony anthology. A few years later…GWAR came out with a book that I contributed to. It seemed like they were happy with my work to keep contacting me.
Anyways…of course I jumped at the chance, because I knew a series with as big a name as BRUCE DICKINSON would get more eyeballs on my work. I even had a very good friend I was hoping would do covers as he was an IRON MAIDEN FREAK! Absolutely loves them!
The gig itself was perfect. I’d illustrate 20+ pages every 60 days for 3 years, until the launch of their latest album. But as we all know nothing is definite until the check clears--especially in comics.
A week before our initial meeting, Bruce decided to “go in a different” direction. The project may have been cancelled for all I knew. [NOTE: Actually, it wasn’t but instead went to one of my favorite long-haired heavy metal-loving British comic artists, STAZ JOHNSON…so really, we all won!]
However…Rantz, threw me a bone to illustrate an 11-page story for another band: TYPE O NEGATIVE.
I’d heard of TYPE O NEGATIVE but never really listened to their music. They were more of a goth/metal thing...not that I was against it. After CANDLEMASS I didn’t really seek out anything Doom Or Goth. I was more of a Power/Melodic metal kind of guy.
So, here’s the crazy thing, I had about 2 weeks to do 11 pages and really no idea how I was going to do it. I wanted it to have a looser rock’n’roll feel to it but wasn’t sure how I was going to get there. The above thumbnails took me 2 days to cook up in Photoshop. I didn’t even do my usual little thumbnails on the actual script. I created a hybrid, something that was polished enough in between thumbnail and rough...and then I blew them up to full size pages to ink!
I’d never really done this with any great success before. My thoughts were if I could get the underlying structures to look solid enough, I could build on it with ink...or pencil in stuff I didn’t feel was quite right.
I ended up inking it primarily with a quill which more or less kept it linear until I went back in to fill in blacks. I knew I wanted to rely on spotting blacks as much as I could because I’m not terribly crazy about the colorists they can afford for these projects. Taking a page from comic artist Alan Davis’ notebook, the more I spot black the less chance people have of messing up the art. Still...they do pick some rather horrible colors.
This was also a first for me to directly incorporate Zip-A-Tone effects in Photoshop. I’ve always liked the halftone gradations, and they really helped me out to create depth and shape things.
The story itself was incredibly simple and straight-forward. I was happy that it didn’t have a lot of buildings or structures to contend with. This is a factor in how fast one can accomplish the work.
The story was based on the cover of a song by Seals and Crofts. TYPE O NEGATIVE’s version was obviously darker and more haunting. I don’t have too many opportunities to illustrate horror material. In fact, I was looking through a bunch of flash fiction I wrote a few years back and realized it’s not a genre that I’ve embraced to any large degree. I’ve tried a few times and the most I come up with is something “disturbing” but not quite horror.
I guess that’s why it was interesting to work on a horror film over the summer. I wouldn’t have picked it for myself, nor would I have written it. Though I grew up with a lot of the Italian horror films and pretty much anything I could find, it was the “disturbing” stuff like HENRY: PORTRAIT OF SERIAL KILLER that haunted me most.
So, here’s the rub.
A lot of people I’ve shown these pages to seemed to really like them. Like them in a way that they like my sketchbooks, and my storyboards. They’re loose, as I had hoped, but my satisfaction in their execution left me feeling flat. I did my best to craft something that was attractive to my eye, but it never rises to what level of finish I prefer.
Sure, there’s a few moments here and there, but overall, I’m left puzzled. How is it some artist like JOSE LUIS GARCIZ-LOPEZ can have both “liveliness” and “solid draftsmanship” to their work? Guys like BILL SIENKIEWICZ can whip ink at the page and yet pull off stunning light and shadows.
Some of my earliest influences were CARLOS ESQUERRA and JUAN GIMENEZ whose works were always loose. But for some reason I could never find what satisfied me. I’ve often felt through the years I was stuck “interpreting” what comics or characters should look like and not ever finding my natural flow. Maybe it was because I felt I could never find work at the “BIG TWO” if I was drawing something of a “marketable” style.
Nowadays the field is wide open. There’s really no need to be stuck in thinking that there’s a HOUSE STYLE or way of working. I need to get out of my own way. If nothing else this project has taught me a lot about what the audience wants. If they like this stuff and I don’t and proceed the way I have been, they won’t vote with their dollars.
On the flipside, if I give them what they like, I won’t be as happy creating the stuff. I won’t like the work that I produce. I’ll enjoy the process...but the finish will mean very little.
BUT...there is a way that does take time. Spending time with myself, in this style, regardless of what I draw, eventually I could find my groove. If I give it a chance, it may EVOLVE into something meaningful for me. And maybe that could be time well spent.
Especially if it means I can produce work faster. All in, these 11 pages took 8 days to produce--from start to finish. So, it can’t be all that bad, can it?
And to think if Rantz hadn’t been friends with Tori Amos all of this would never have happened. Who says LUCK isn’t a large part of this business?
=s=
P.S. If you haven’t seen our SUBSTACK LIVE w/ RANTZ check it out HERE!