Liz Baillie’s ongoing webcomic Freewheel can best be described as a slice-of-life fantasy.  Volume 1 of the series (collecting the first five chapters) introduces us to Jamie, the young girl who runs away from a foster home in order to find her brother.  Baillie slowly reveals a world of hobo encampments, secret cants and signs and an invisible culture.  As the reader adjusts to this new information, Baillie eases the reader into the real fantasy elements of the series.  This culture is intimately wrapped up with the magical, the mysterious the unexplained and the quite hazardous.  Ballie uses the classic fantasy story tradition of leaving the protagonist completely in the dark as both reader and heroine try to decipher this world.

Baillie is a cartoonist whose previous book, My Brain Hurts, was a slice-of-life/coming-of-age queer youth story set in 1990s New York.  There weren’t plot threads so much as there were occasionally overlapping character threads.  In the first volume of Freewheel, the plot was mostly an excuse to find ways to introduce and explore a variety of interesting characters.  Baillie was in no hurry to get the reader from point A to point B and instead invited readers to get lost in moments of chitchat and story-spinning with her characters.

That said, there was still an easily-discernible plot thread to pick up in the first book, and that continues here.  The second volume very much feels like the second act of a three-act work.  With characters established, Baillie deepens mysteries, introduces new threats, derails Jamie’s plans and finally points her back in the right direction to set up the climax of the story.  As such, there’s a little less of the ambling charm of the first book to be found here, given that Baillie is spending a lot of time hinting to the reader that the mysteries of the book go far deeper than one would initially suspect.

Some of the fantasy elements of the story remind me of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.  That’s the story of a man accidentally exposed to the secret culture that lives underneath London, a scavenger society with the same sort of rules & regulations regarding contact & business that Baillie slowly unravels in Freewheel.  Both books are quite clever in how they take urban or national legends and weave them together in unexpected ways.  In both stories, knowledge is one’s most valuable weapon, because its lack is quite hazardous.  A significant difference is that Gaiman’s characters feel more clever than truly heartfelt; one always understands that they are characters, not people.  In Baillie’s story, she has a way of endowing even the most trivial of characters with a sense of humanity, even warmth.  Even the most eccentric characters get just enough backstory for the reader to understand why they’re lunatics.  That said, the “darkness” introduced as the primary antagonist feels awfully generic and cliched at the moment.  We’ll see what Baillie ultimately does in setting the series’ ultimate conflict on its ear so as to avoid easy “light vs dark” cliches.

Throughout the course of illustrating the frequently challenging layouts, Baillie has become quite an assured storyteller.  The complexity of her pages, the intuitive and almost poetic full-page word/image mash-ups, and the way she depicts gesture & interpersonal contact make this a beautiful strip to simply look at.  About the only aspect of her art that I find lacking is the way she depicts motion.  It’s herky-jerky and static at times, lacking a sense of panel-to-panel flow.  Baillie mostly avoids having to do straight chase or fight scenes, so the impact of this is minimal if still noticeable at times.  Honestly, Baillie could turn this weakness into a strength if she played up the static nature of her drawings in an exaggerated fashion during action sequences.

What is most interesting about this chapter of Freewheel is the way in which it becomes quite clear that this is a girl’s story in a society were women have every bit as much clout as a men.  Jamie’s “minder” is a girl, the minder’s mentor is a woman, Jamie’s spiritual advisor is a female cat-creature called the Contessa, etc.  It’s all very matter-of-fact and subtle but still serves as an interesting corrective for the thousands of entries in the “boys’ adventures” genre.  Baillie plans to wrap up the story in the third book and then start a sequel using the same set of characters.  It’s a world that clearly appeals to Baillie’s punk rock sensibilities, a gritty world that nonetheless has a lot of room for warm-heartedness and friendship.

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That the first one is possible only in a comic strip seems obvious. The next two, scrolling down, are perhaps less obvious. But in both, the multiple images not only attract attention to themselves (an important aspect of competing with other strips on the same page for readers) but create, by their very multiplicity, a puzzle that the concluding panels “solve.” Only in the comics.

Here are a couple more:

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In these two strips, the visual devices to which Scott and Borgman have resorted may seem obvious. But, as Samuel Johnson is said to have remarked about the alleged genius of Gulliver’s Travels, once you have thought of little people, the rest is a foregone conclusion. Well, yes. But thinking of the little people wasn’t all that easy.

You can find this sort of deployment of image and verbiage in Zits several times a week. I can’t help thinking that a contributing factor may be that Borgman has more creative time on his hands these days than he did when he was also doing editorial cartoons several times a week. To fill the time, he doodles up more and more outlandish combinations of word and picture. Not by formula, mind you. But combining word and picture into an image is how a cartoonist thinks. That’s his way of being. He does it without, er, thinking about it.

Here’s another one — Zits breaking a taboo this time.

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That’s Pierce’s bare ass he’s holding in the third panel. Bare buttocks are forbidden visual fare in most comic strips. In Pierce’s remark, however, Scott and Borgman surrender to contemporary mores in substituting “butt” for “ass.” Yes, they mean the same thing, but somehow “butt” is less offensive than “ass.” Dunno why.

Below Zits is another in our continuing series showing how toilet humor has infected newspaper comic strips. I can’t seem to go a week these days without encountering yet another example of the same erstwhile verboten topic. What a joke. Two days! I can’t go two days without another toilet joke!

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Darby Conley may have achieved an Enviable First in Get Fuzzy for Feb. 26 — a picture of a comic strip character sitting on the toilet! Not that I mind, y’unnerstan. If it’s funny — and this one is — any amount of porcelain can be tolerated, even welcomed.

In Zits, one more time — only in the comics. We don’t need the words much in this one — except to add a dimension of familiar personality to the episode. Borgman’s visual touches always amaze as well as amuse. Jeremy’s mother’s boobs jump when she gets the full blast of her son’s “music” through the earpiece. And we don’t really need Jeremy’s father in this strip for the joke: His getting burnt to a crisp is a laugh bonus.

Excellent, excellent, excellent.

images ©their respective owners

Previously: Part One.

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DAVID ROBERTSON: You said earlier that 2000 AD’s attitude to you around the early/mid ’80s was that you’d have to prove yourself able to work for them, but later on, they came and asked for you. Was that purely down to your profile being boosted by the U.S. work, or was there a personnel changed over at 2000 AD? Was it the very same people inviting you aboard who had previously not been so keen?

JOHN RIDGWAY: Steve McManus was editor when I first approached them. He was still in overall charge when I started to get regular work, but Richard Burton was editor, with Alan McKenzie as sub-editor. Why they chose to approach me is open to conjecture — I didn’t approach them a second time.

ROBERTSON: It’s interesting to hear your attitude to horror in comics. When I think of something like Summer Magic in 2000 AD, your work there proves it can be done very effectively. Do you look back on those stories fondly?

RIDGWAY: Summer Magic was the style of story I had hoped that Hellblazer would be. It was much nearer to the Hammer Films school of horror than the Clive Barker school. The scripts were well written (Alan McKenzie is a close friend of Steve Parkhouse and Steve had given him pointers on how to write). In many ways, the story is like the “Man of Iron” Transformers story I worked on with Steve , also featuring a young boy. While there are elements of horror in the story, the main theme was the boy learning magic against the background of a horror/mystery. The story featured many things I love: creepy trees with twisted roots and branches, rural community (I am not a city-loving person), and likable characters. I never found anyone in Hellblazer to be likable — they were all entirely self-interested, lacking any real human warmth or feeling. If you compare the version of Constantine in Hellblazer with the version in The Trenchcoat Brigade you will see that John Ney Reiber’s version is someone you could grow to like. Delano’s version was someone who would sacrifice his friends to save himself.

ROBERTSON: It’s true there are similarities between Summer Magic and your Transformers story. That hadn’t occurred to me before. It was quite a leap you know, speaking as one of those young readers at the time, between issue 8 of Transformers, which reprinted the U.S. bombastic action style story — at the end of which all the Transformers are blown to pieces. Then moving on to your story, which looked so subdued comparatively, and also had no immediate connection to the storyline that had been running. I don’t know if you’re aware of the effect it had on young readers at the time!

RIDGWAY: Tom DeFalco once explained the difficulties in doing a comic based around licensed products.  Contracts have to be signed and the lead-in to the comic planned long before the comic is seen. In fact, if a toy is not successful, the comic could only start coming out after the toy had left the market. This happened with Zoids, Mask and several other toy lines that did not catch on and lost the comic companies money. It was obvious, however, that the monthly material from Marvel in the States would not be sufficient for a weekly British comic. So Marvel U.K. was going to have to fill the gap.

When Steve and I were asked to produce material for a British version, I had only seen a few pages of the American comic and we had only the barest notion of the background except that the Transformers had come to Earth in the prehistoric past and had lain dormant until the present day, when the second set — the villains — had arrived. I didn’t even see character-reference drawings, so all my Transformers were drawn from the actual toys. We had no idea of the plot lines, so we had to come up with something that did not interfere with Marvel’s plot lines.

I came up with the idea of a second set of Transformers in Britain, having come to Earth to find the first lot and Steve took it from there. Steve’s style of storytelling is nothing like the American style but I was totally unaware of whether the “Man of Iron” story was received any better or any worse than the Americans. As I say, I only saw a few pages of the American version, but I wouldn’t have liked to work on that style of story. Constant battles soon become boring to draw and lack atmosphere. Steve introduced an element of mystery and fantasy, which could have taken the story much further.

Going back to Summer Magic, I’m rather surprised that you considered it a horror story. I don’t consider it to be much different from the Harry Potter stories. Horror is a rather mild element, not a predominant feature as was the case in Hellblazer.

“Summer Magic’ in 2000 AD #576, May 28, 1988, written by Alan McKenzie. ©Fleetway Publications

ROBERTSON: Yes, that’s true. I guess I was thinking mainly of the showdown at the end with the creature. I was struck at the time by just how spooky it looked standing amongst the trees. Summer Magic was really quite out of place and different from everything else in 2000 AD, wasn’t it?

RIDGWAY: It was something I found very enjoyable to draw — I’m sorry it didn’t continue when David Bishop became editor, but he had ideas as to where 2000 AD should be heading, and Luke Kirby didn’t fit in with his ideas. Seeing that it was a forerunner to Books of Magic from DC Comics, and Harry Potter — I think he got it wrong.

ROBERTSON: It is a shame it didn’t go any further. I take it you and Alan McKenzie don’t own Luke Kirby. You wouldn’t be able to start up the story again and publish it yourself?

RIDGWAY: When David Bishop took over 2000 AD, it was apparent that he didn’t want Alan McKenzie or me working on the magazine. Neither of us signed over the rights to Luke Kirby, but part of the contract for other work on the Megazine called for me to sign over my rights. Of course, there is nothing to stop us doing The Fred Kirby Chronicles — but as Alan McKenzie is reported to have said I was unreliable, that is unlikely to happen.

ROBERTSON: Why did he say that?

RIDGWAY: I don’t know. I heard, years later, that he had said it in an interview. As I have always prided myself in my reliability, I found it offensive.

ROBERTSON: Maybe he never said it at all. Or these things sometimes seem worse in print.

RIDGWAY: You may be right. The same thought had occurred to me. But there is no way to prove it one way or the other.

ROBERTSON: Maybe he’ll read the interview and get in touch. I’m interested in the set-up whereby you had to sign over the rights to Luke Kirby in order to get other work. How is that put to you? Bluntly? Give us your character or you don’t get any more work?

RIDGWAY: It was a long-standing tradition in comics that the publisher owns everything you do. D.C. Thomson always asked you to sign and return a form to say that you had received payment and thereby acknowledged that they owned all rights. You don’t get reprint fees or anything. That is fine — you accept it and get on with the next job. I.P.C.  (and that company’s forerunners) didn’t issue any contracts that I am aware of.  It was “accepted” that work done for them was theirs and you didn’t create a fuss. As an engineer, that seemed quite normal to me. I designed an incinerator and was paid for my work. The incinerator was built. If another incinerator was built from that design, I didn’t expect to be paid twice. If a lot were built I didn’t expect royalties.

However, contracts started to be issued on work for 2000 AD to make it compatible with the terms offered by Marvel and DC in the States, who were offering more-regular work with royalties and reprint fees. I should have received contracts for my work, but never did (I didn’t receive any deadlines either — things seemed a bit sloppy in the editorial department).

At the time I was working on “The Night Walker” — the second Luke Kirby story — I was also working on My Name is Chaos for DC Comics (four 48-page books). I had no deadlines for Luke Kirby, but I had agreed to a deadline with DC and had signed a contract with them. I was drawing six pages in black and white per week for DC, followed by three pages per week (in color) for 2000 AD — working alternate weeks. I then fell ill and spent several weeks in hospital over a period of three months, during which I couldn’t work. I was 51 at the time and found this extremely worrying as my father had died when he was 50. Eventually I was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia, which, until it is treated leads to all sorts of effects connected to nervousness — panic attacks, depression etc.

Once the problem was diagnosed, it could be treated (it is not curable). I returned to work with DC pressing me to complete within the agreed deadline. I was forced to give the DC work priority and return to Luke Kirby after I had finished that. You will appreciate that, overall, this did not affect the period needed to complete Luke Kirby (except that there was the extra three-month period when I was incapacitated). However, as there was no deadline, and other artists were taking very long times to complete their work, I thought little of it.

Sometime later, I was asked by Charles Vess (whom I had worked with on a couple of other occasions) to work with him on Prince Valiant for Marvel. This was to be another four 48-page series. Charlie was to write it, I would pencil it, and he would ink it. As we were starting (I had just had designs for plate armor for the characters accepted), I was approached by DC to draw the monthly Books of Magic comic. DC were prepared to wait until I finished Prince Valiant but then press of work forced Charlie to step out of the inking. Having seen what other Marvel inkers had done with my work, I decided to do the inking myself. Unfortunately, DC could not wait the extra time until I could start Magic so I lost that series. About that time, Alan McKenzie approached me about the next Luke Kirby story. He was now coming up with a schedule. (I think there had been a problem with the powers that be about the amount of work being paid for and accumulating in drawers.) There was no way I could keep to that schedule so he asked whether I minded if Steve Parkhouse drew it. I had no objections, but Steve asked that I ink it. I explained that the inking, as far as I was concerned, was the longest part of the job. So Steve did the job on his own. I therefore lost Books of Magic and Luke Kirby due to Charlie dropping out of the inking on Prince Valiant.

I did tell Alan McKenzie that I wanted to do the next Luke Kirby story (the last) but I found that he had also gone to Steve for that. I should point out that was an unwritten agreement at 2000 AD that the original creators of a character are approached first about any new story.

When David Bishop took over 2000 AD I asked him about work. He told me there would be no more Luke Kirby stories, the story by Nick Abadzis would not be continued and there were to be no more Vector 13 stories. In fact, nothing I had been working on. So when I was asked to sign a form saying that they owned Luke Kirby, I didn’t bother.  I didn’t receive any work from 2000 AD while he or Andy Diggle were editors.

I finally received work from Alan Barnes when he took over. By that time Rebellion owned 2000 AD and issued a contract for every job. An addendum of each contract was a list of all the work done by that person on work owned by that company — which included Luke Kirby. I doubt that rebellion ever knew that I hadn’t signed away Kirby, and it no longer seemed worthwhile making a fuss.

ROBERTSON: Interesting. You never did give them the rights to the character, but they assumed them anyway. I see your point with the incinerator design analogy. I do wonder though, because it’s art that you’re involved in, isn’t it different? Your comics work is more akin to a novel or a song than an appliance. You wouldn’t have Stephen King or Paul McCartney being paid nothing each time their work is repackaged.

RIDGWAY: Quite true — but then if Stephen King or Paul McCartney had worked in British comics you would never have heard of them. There is only Eagle that put all the writers’ and artists’ names on the pages. At D.C. Thomson, the only name on work was Dudley D. Watkins. At Fleetway/Odhams/Amalgamated, it was Frank S. Pepper (on Captain Condor).

It was only when Marvel and DC in the States started rustling British creators that the Amalgamated — by that time they were I.P.C. — (and only on 2000 AD) started to realize they had to do something or lose their creators. When I started working for the States, the dollar was nearly 1:1. Rates in the UK started to go up to match the American rates and contracts were introduced. But the dollar started to fall against the pound — to almost 2:1. Rates have remained very much the same for 15 years.

Creators and contributors were largely anonymous in this country until events like Westminster Comic Marts and UKCAC introduced readers to creators. If you are freelance and anonymous you have no protection from exploitation. People today think of Eagle as old-fashioned. It wasn’t. It was well in advance of its time. Decent printing, large format, quality paper, rates of pay and regular work that ensured a livelihood for the creators without them having to seek work elsewhere or “hibernate” when their services were not required. Quality stories and very good artwork. Merchandising from Dan Dare, Riders of the Range, and PC 49. Readers’ page to make readers feel they were part of what was going on. Hulton’s Boys’ and Girls’ Exhibition. Spin-off books. Hulton’s treated their comics as a class act — something other publishers in this country failed to do.

Before I became aware of his work in these comics, Ridgway had already been drawing for more than a decade on titles such as Warrior and Commando. (His work continues to appear in the latter to this day.) With his expertise in creating atmospheres to the fore, his style also lends itself to fantasy tales, such as Summer Magic (a proto-Harry Potter type story published in the 1980s). His unique take on Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk, and establishing the template for DC’s Hellblazer made his reputation in American comics.

I found Ridgway extremely open as an interviewee. He surprised me on a few occasions with his opinions and how forthright he was with them. It made for an interesting chat.

David Robertson

Click to view larger image. “Hunger” in Hellblazer #1 (January 1988), written by Jamie Delano. ©1988 DC Comics Inc.

DAVID ROBERTSON: How did the Hellblazer job come about? It was really your big break into U.S. comics. It had a big launch, being a spin-off from Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

JOHN RIDGWAY: Jamie Delano was a close friend of Alan Moore’s, and I had worked with them both — Delano had written a Doctor Who story. Carl Potts at Marvel U.S. had already got me working for Marvel in the States. I had a long background of drawing comics for Commando, and I had shown I could produce a variety of work, both realistic and fantasy. At that time I was probably the highest-profile artist at Marvel U.K. after Alan Davis. Alan Davis was altering all Delano’s scripts for Captain Britain and had fallen out with Alan Moore. So, I suppose I was a natural choice.

Click to view larger image. “The Evil That Men Do” in The Incredible Hulk #335 (September 1987,), written by Peter David. ©1987 Marvel Characters Inc.

ROBERTSON: Ah, now your work for Marvel. I must ask about your issue of The Hulk, which has gone down as somewhat of a cult classic. They’ve reprinted it at least a few times that I know of.  That story was really creepy, and quite a change of tone for The Hulk. How did you enjoy drawing that one?

RIDGWAY: If I remember, it was a full script. Peter David is a good writer with a lot of experience. He didn’t over-write picture descriptions and left a lot to the reader’s own imagination. I have no problem doing creepy, but I think horror in a comic is a waste of time — the reader is too remote. It’s the same with a big-budget film seen on a small TV screen — the impact is lost. The only slight problem I had was with police uniforms and had to modify them after they sent me ref for the correct uniform for that particular state. I enjoyed it quite a lot and Peter David told me he liked what I had done. Unfortunately, it was only a fill-in to give the regular artist a breathing space. I would have enjoyed doing some more.

ROBERTSON: It certainly made an impact. I imagine that the Hulk and Hellblazer stuff is what the readers in the U.S. recognize you for most. Would that be true to say?

RIDGWAY: Yes, I should think that’s right.

ROBERTSON: What are you working on right now, as we speak?

RIDGWAY: I’m currently working on an 11-page Torchwood story — don’t know which issue it will go in. Also have another Commando story on the go — this one about a giant French submarine (it really existed), large enough to carry a floatplane in a hanger. Also coloring up a series I drew about 15 years ago, called Age of Heroes for the new Strip Magazine and writing a science-fiction series called Frontiers for the same Bosnian publisher. In my spare time, I am coloring Ken Reid’s Fudge the Elf, Syd Jordan’s Earthspace/Lance McLane/Jeff Hawke and Ron Turner’s Space Ace, all for possible collections for graphic albums. Apart from that, nothing much …

ROBERTSON: Wow, so you’re as busy as ever, if not busier. Do you see it as an aim for yourself to get involved with creator-owned work?

RIDGWAY: Essentially. I had planned to retire this year and concentrate on my own stuff.

ROBERTSON: Oh! OK, I’ll ask you what that entails later, but first I’d like to ask how you got into comics.  I believe you were established in another field before starting in the business.

RIDGWAY: I went to engineering college rather than art school, so I went into an engineering drawing office when I was 17 — drawing and eventually designing ventilation schemes and air-conditioning plants. At the same time, I was drawing up ideas for comics with a vague idea of sometime drawing comics. One of the men I worked with had a sister who worked for the Daily Mirror and he sent her a strip I had drawn — a Western. The main character was drawn from a photo of Rock Hudson. The Mirror said that if I lived in the London area they would have taken me on. (That could have been a get-out without putting me down). The plant section at the H & V company closed down and I went to work in the DO at Dunlops in Manchester, working on the design of rubber lifeboats, submarine escape suits, etc. Then, as Dunlops were moving to Skelmersdale, I went to work for a company making radiators for commercial vehicles. I specialized there on the closed-circuit cooling equipment and taught myself to design and draw wiring diagrams for the equipment. At that time, I had also started drawing Commando stories for D.C. Thomsons, more or less as a paid hobby. I then went on to an engineering company building coal-fired stokers, conveyors for the coal prep plants and incinerators. I specialized on the incinerators, learning the physics and chemistry of the combustion processes, refractory engineering and more complex electrical design. With the decline in the coal industry, and the increasing percentage of plastic material in the waste being handled by incinerators, it became no longer viable for the company to design new incineration plants. At that time, I had started work on Warrior magazine which led to Doctor Who and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. The security of that work gave me the opportunity to move out of engineering and become a full-time freelance artist.

ROBERTSON: So you’ve always been using your design and drawing skills in your jobs along the way. Interesting that you were drawing ideas for comics from the age of 17. I take it you were reading comics from a young age?

RIDGWAY: I started with Tiger Tim and Chicks’ Own then progressed to Dandy and Beano. I was 10 when the Eagle came out, and that was a great incentive to draw. After Lion came out I created a comic on a pad of writing paper called (imaginatively enough) Tiger. It lasted for about half an issue. I grew up on TV21, Junior Express and Junior Mirror.

I should add that technical knowledge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helps me fill in details and understand precisely what I am seeing on a photograph when drawing Commando stuff. On the other hand, I find it almost impossible to draw something I know could not work. If I design a spacecraft, for instance, it is usually a lot smoother and more streamlined than those that have been created since the first Star Wars films. This is not because streamlining is not necessary in space, but rather because sharp edges on a spacecraft would lead to different temperatures on the edges joined by the edge. One side would be more brightly lit than the other, therefore having a higher temperature than the darker face and this would lead to different amounts of expansion, resulting in stresses on the joint, metal fatigue and, eventually, fracture. In terms of expansion, a refractory firebrick, for instance, would have expanded by 1.5 mm at a temp of 1000 deg C.

ROBERTSON: Ah … OK. I’ll take your word for it, John. Your technical knowledge outstrips mine. You can’t just throw caution to the wind and draw something that looks nice if it’s too improbable. Did you have favourite stories in the comics you read growing up? Any particular writers and/or artists?

RIDGWAY: In those days, very few artists and writers were given credits. I think Frank S. Pepper, writing Captain Condor was the the only writer I was aware of, but i thought Captain Condor was too meandering a story to be really interesting. I loved Dan Dare, but it was only with Operation Saturn that I took notice of who was drawing it. Burne Hogarth was an artist I admired. His work on Tarzan, appearing in Mike Moorcock’s Tarzan Adventures was beautifully drawn after his first few weeks’ work. Mike Moorcock made sure that readers knew all the artists — Bob Lubbers, John Celardo, etc. There was also Alden McWilliams drawing Twin Earths (which appeared in various formats) and WDL’s Tom Corbett, Space Cadet,  Syd Jordan’s Jeff Hawke, Ray Bailey’s Tom Corbett, Space Cadet newpaper strip, Mac Raboy on Captain Marvel Jr. and Flash Gordon, Graham Cotton drawing Air Ace stories and lots of stories in Tiger, Arturo Del Castillo on The Three Musketeers, Wayne Boring’s Superman (Australian black-and-white reprints), Ken Reid’s Fudge the Elf (before he went to D.C. Thomson and created Jonah). There were many artists, few writers.

ROBERTSON: It’s amazing how many great artists have been forgotten, just because they weren’t credited. Kids grew up loving the particular style of one artist but didn’t know who they were. Now, you said your first published work was for D.C. Thomson’s and Commando. When was this, and was it a case of sending stuff to their office on spec? I assume that stuff was uncredited on publication?

RIDGWAY: Actually, my first published work was for War Picture Library, Air Ace Library and an annual for WDL, Manchester about 12 months after I got married. I married Rita in 1975; we are still going strong. The War and Air Ace stuff was eight-page fillers; the annual was just a couple of illustrations. The War and Air stuff was uncredited. The annual stuff was credited to the wrong guy. From there I went to D.C. Thomson and started drawing Commando stories, evenings and weekends for extra cash to furnish the house and pay for holidays. My first son, Martin was born 18 months after we were married, and my youngest son, Ian, came 18 months after that.

ROBERTSON: Of all your Commando stories, do any come to mind as a favorite for you?

RIDGWAY: I’ve drawn so many Commando stories that they all tend to run together in my mind.

One thing I do remember is the very first story I drew: Mustang Ace. One of the characters was named Olaf and there seemed to be several close-ups of him with the description “Close-up of Olaf looking grim.” Now, whenever my wife sees me drawing a close-up, she says “Close-up of Olaf looking grim.”

Click to view larger image. “Mustang Ace” in Commando #546  ©1971 D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.

The stories I most enjoy are the historical ones – Romans or Vikings or Ancient Greeks. They often give me the chance to distinguish between characters as there can be a wide variety of costumes. Those stories often give me a chance to draw some atmospheric scenes and also draw scenery. I also love horses and these stories often allow me to draw them. Stories like Journey’s End 3928, Army of Heroes 3413 and Seek the Sword 3640 come to mind.

Click to view larger image. “Army of Heroes” in Commando #3413 (March 2001), D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.

Click to view larger image. “Seek the Sword” in Commando #3640, ©2003 D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd.

ROBERTSON: Do you prefer drawing scenery or people?

RIDGWAY: That’s a difficult question to answer. Rather like “do I prefer eating to drinking?” I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t like to go for long without either.

A film director will spend ages finding the right location for a scene, but it’s not much good without actors. Scenery adds atmosphere and variety to a story, especially where you have color available and the page shape and picture layout allows you to vary the picture shape to suit the scene as you see it.

A close-up of a character is often interesting to draw, but if it’s a character you know you will never see again after you finish that book, what’s the interest in developing that character in your own mind? The character becomes a casual acquaintance rather than someone you know well — little more than someone you pass in the street. The first time you draw a German Tiger tank from WWII you will probably copy a photograph. Draw it again and you will probably have to construct it — complete with all the wheels and suspension, hatches spades strapped on the side etc. etc. Draw it a hundred times and it’s just another chore.

One thing I hate drawing is skyscrapers. All the windows are slightly different in size due to perspective. Finish that building and go on to the one next door. Thousands of windows again. And so on down the street. Then start the next picture with its skyscrapers — and the next picture, and the next.

Probably, this is why I want to draw my own stuff. I can tell the stories in my own way, in my own terms. If I want to draw a sorcerer’s tower on a high crag, I can arrange a tall picture. I can add pictures and combine pictures and do the same with dialogue.

So it’s not a case of whether I prefer drawing scenery or people, it’s a case of story itself, the characters and drama of the locations. It’s a question of context.

]]> http://classic.tcj.com/superhero/david-roberston-an-interview-with-john-ridgway/feed/ 5 http://classic.tcj.com/blog/next-week-on-tcj-com-5/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=next-week-on-tcj-com-5 http://classic.tcj.com/blog/next-week-on-tcj-com-5/#comments Sat, 19 Feb 2011 01:00:41 +0000 admin http://www.tcj.com/?p=29941 The White Rhinoceros and getting arrested at a David Cassidy concert. John Ridgway talks about his four decades in comics, from Commando and Doctor Who to Hellblazer and The Hulk. R.C. Harvey selects the best editorial cartoons of 2010. Reviewed: Grant Morrison's The Return of Bruce Wayne, Tezuka’s Ayoko, Tim Kreider's Twilight of the Assholes, Robert Venditti's Homeland Directive, editor Neil Gaiman's The Best American Comics 2010, Metaphrog's Louis: Night Salad, Matt Fraction's Casanova, Desmond Reed's minis and the latest entries in Fantagraphics’ Ignatz line ... And much more! Image from "The Evil that Men Do!" written by Peter David and drawn by John Ridgeway, collected in The Incredible Hulk #335 (September 1987) [© Marvel Characters, Inc.] ]]> Shaun Partridge and Josh Simmons talk about The White Rhinoceros and getting arrested at a David Cassidy concert. John Ridgway talks about his four decades in comics, from Commando and Doctor Who to Hellblazer and The Hulk. R.C. Harvey selects the best editorial cartoons of 2010. Reviewed: Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne, Tezuka’s Ayoko, Tim Kreider’s Twilight of the Assholes, Robert Venditti’s Homeland Directive, editor Neil Gaiman’s The Best American Comics 2010, Metaphrog’s Louis: Night Salad, Matt Fraction’s Casanova, Desmond Reed’s minis and the latest entries in Fantagraphics’ Ignatz line ... And much more!

Image from “The Evil that Men Do!” written by Peter David and drawn by John Ridgeway, collected in The Incredible Hulk #335 (September 1987) [© Marvel Characters, Inc.]

Mathhias Wivel took in the Moebius exhibit.

Sean Michael Robinson interviewed Cerebus‘ Gerhard gave about craft and technique: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

R. C. Harvey on virtuosity in cartooning.

Rob Clough got The Broadcast.

R.C. Harvey had the poop on poop in the funny pages.

Shaenon Garrity looked back at City of Glass.

Kristian Williams examined a field guide for use during a zombie attack.

Gavin Lees wants you to help him figure out what’s going on in a panel in Oji Suzuki’s A Single Match.

R.C. Harvey explained how editorial cartoons handled the censorship of Huckleberry Finn.

Rich Kreiner was a good boy this year and got a copy of The Simpsons episode guide as a gift.

Nathan Wilson looked at Liar’s Kiss.

R. C. Harvey pondered the connection between stand-up comedy and comic strips.

An HU brawl about Ebony White spilled over to tcj.com via Tom Crippen.

Belgian Bart Croonenborghs told us about The Girl and the Gorilla.

Jesse Tangen-Mills began an examination of blackface in comics south of the border.

Marco Pellitteri noted the Lucca comics festival mirrored the state of Italian comics.

He’s soft spoken, self-effacing. Thoughtful. He worked on almost 5,000 pages over 20 years, but in the past seven years has struggled to draw at all. His former partner is one of the most well-documented figures working in comics, and yet he himself has given only a handful of interviews.

For 20 years, Canadian artist Gerhard worked as a background artist and environmental designer on Cerebus, one of the most sprawling pieces of visual fiction ever created. His designs and meticulously crafted drawings served to ground even the most fantastic of events, or drastic of stylistic shifts. Sim and Gerhard worked in a way that to many may seem unimaginable — Sim penciling and inking his characters in vast fields of white, and handing them off to his collaborator sometimes with the barest of instructions. A pencil line for a table, a hastily written note reading “door.” And yet the resulting work almost always seem unified, of a piece. It’s a remarkable tribute to Gerhard that no matter what was happening in the foreground of the books, the characters always seemed grounded in a reality, capable of exploring and interacting with their richly textured world.

Gerhard and I spoke to each other over the course of a few hours on Boxing Day, December 26^th, 2010. On each end of our respective phone lines we both had an intimidating stack of books — the almost five thousand pages that Sim and Gerhard created together over the course of those 20 years. We flipped through the books chronologically, with the idea of discussing the evolution of Gerhard’s process and techniques, focusing on his development as an artist and a craftsman. I find that when cartoonists get together to talk, they almost inevitably end up circling around issues of craft, grilling each other on the “how to” and the “what for.” I consider Gerhard a master draftsman, and one of the greatest pen and ink renderers of the last 50 years, and so I thought that such a conversation with him would be compelling for pen and ink enthusiasts, for Cerebus admirers, or for or those curious about a job whose quality depends on its invisibility. He did not disappoint.

For those of you who are hoping for a juicy expose on Gerhard and Sim’s working relationship, or the dissolution of their partnership, I’m afraid you might be disappointed. I hope you stick around anyway, though, and enjoy — there’s a lot to take in.

— Sean Michael Robinson

Robinson: Do you remember much about your formative art experiences? Were they in a classroom, with your parents, or …?

Gerhard: My mother’s told me I was the easiest kid to keep occupied. If she was busy with housework, all she had to do was give me a piece of paper and a pencil or some crayons and I was quiet for hours. Drawing is just something that I’ve always liked to do. In school I would doodle more often than I would take notes.

In high school, I had three notebooks. One was for math and science, and one was for English and geography and those were empty and pristine. And the third notebook was just jam-packed with blank paper, and I would just doodle in it constantly. And when I filled up that notebook I would take all the pages out and usually just throw them away and fill it up again with blank paper, and off I’d go.

I remember one particular time in math class the teacher had given us these assignments to work on. He wasn’t teaching — everyone was working quietly on the math problem or whatever it was — and of course I’m sitting there lost in my own little world doodling stuff. And unnoticed by me, he was walking up and down the aisle seeing how everyone was doing. And he came up behind me and sort of reached over my shoulder and picked up this notebook with all my doodles in it. And I thought, “I’m screwed. I’m totally screwed.” This wasn’t intended for anyone but me, so there was anything and everything in there. So I thought, “This is it. I’m going down to the office. I’m dead, I’m dead.” And he closed the book, started at the beginning, and he flipped through it until he got to the page I was doodling on. Then he put it back down on my desk and continued walking up the aisle helping people with their math problems, and I thought, “Whew.” Because he could have really hung me up to dry.

I’ve been thinking about this — I thought you might ask me about my early influences. And I would love to quote all these great names, Bernie Wrightson and other brilliant artists. But I realized that one of my biggest early influences was my babysitter. I was maybe in grade three. And she was probably just late teens, just a girl, I have no idea what her name was. I had a paint-by-numbers coloring book, a Stingray coloring book, the TV show with the marionettes and the  submarine. But I only had the book — I didn’t have the paints, the colors. So she was trying to get me to sit down and draw. And I said, “I can’t because I don’t have the paints to put the colors in.”

She said, “OK, why don’t you try this?” She pointed out that the number one on the page was yellow, the lightest color. So she said “leave that one blank.” For the number two, the next darkest color, orange or whatever, she said, “Put in just one set of lines. [Laughing.] And then for three, the next darkest color, put in two sets of lines. And for the four, put in three sets of lines.” She basically taught me right then and there how to think in a grayscale. [Laughter.] Once I started doing that, I realized it actually worked and I was amazed. I remembered that just recently.”Oh my God, that’s really where I first learned to crosshatch and think in a grayscale!”

As far as any other art training goes, I never took any sort of extra classes or anything like that. Actually I was not a good student in high school. I majored in drugs, mostly.

Robinson: Which drugs in particular?

Gerhard: Oh, marijuana mostly. I actually had to take grade 10 art three times before I passed it.

Robinson: Oh my God.

high school doodle, 1975 or 1976

Gerhard: Mostly because the curriculum was divided — the first half of the year was drawing and painting, which I was fine with, and the second half of the year was ceramics and sculpture, which I didn’t care for at all. My one pottery thing that I built blew up in the kiln and wrecked everybody else’s stuff that was in there. I guess you could say I’m self-taught. For the longest time I had a lot of trouble talking about this kind of stuff. You know, influences and technique — because basically I was learning on the job. And I was embarrassed to look at the early stuff. As I’m sure Dave is to look at a Cerebus #1. He probably cringes every time. [Laughter.]

Robinson: When you say early stuff, which particular period are you referring to? How long would you consider that journeyman stage?

Gerhard: I don’t think there was ever one particular turning point. It was a very gradually evolving thing — I just slowly got better. Thank God. [Laughter.]

Sean Michael Robinson: “Strangely, Gerhard and a friend used this aardvark (adapted from the anteater in the BC comics) as a logo for years, well before they’d ever heard of Dave Sim or Cerebus.”

Robinson: In the first 300 pages you worked on in Church and State, it’s amazing the amount of techniques you’re adding through that time — and subtracting too.

Gerhard: Right, yeah. Get rid of what doesn’t work, keep what does work, and you slowly build up a bag of tricks. Like when something worked, you kept that. “OK, remember how you did that.” And when something didn’t work, it was like “Don’t do that again.”

Robinson: It’s interesting to me to look at the very first issue. You seemed to avoid contour lines a lot for the backgrounds and more focused on the value relationships, but you almost immediately ditched that.

Gerhard: That’s the problem with learning on the job — all these thousands of people get to see all of your mistakes. And luckily I managed to muddle through that. It was a learning process for both Dave and I. He has this incredible ability to mimic almost any drawing style. And when he got stuck, when he had a page where he’s thinking “How should this look? How should I present this? What is the effect I want here?” — all he had to do was to pull out a Bernie Wrightson book or Jeff Jones or whoever, and he could emulate that. He tried to get me to do the same sort of thing. And I would look at those references, but ultimately it would always work out best if I just drew the way that I drew. Not trying to fight it. I would try to make it look a little more like that, but I would still have to do it the way I do it. That was just the way it worked best. And it usually involved a whole lot of little lines. [Laughing.]

Robinson: Well, you certainly modified your inking style at times. Not to jump too far ahead, Going Home is very pattern focused, and Form and Void has the stark contrast.

Gerhard: And that was actually really difficult for me, because I really do think in a grayscale, in those tonal values. I realized at some point that it sort of defines the differences in the personalities of Dave and I: He’s very much a black-and-white kind of guy, even in his thinking, and I am more shades of gray. He was a master at spotting blacks. In High Society, before I started on the book, there was a lot of black. He was concentrating on the writing and the characters and there’d be a whole lot of black on the page, which was basically why he asked me to come on board and flesh out the world that Cerebus lives in.

Robinson: To take that up, how much back-reading of Cerebus did you do before you actually worked on the Epic stories, or the series? Did you actually sit down and read all of the issues?

Gerhard: At the time before I started on Cerebus, I was working at the local art supply store, which was appropriately named The Art Store. And I was doing some commercial jobs on the side, trying to make some money and trying to build up a portfolio of published, or at least printed, work. So a lot of it was commercial work. I would have to draw snow tires and meat pies. One assignment was to draw a frozen beef pie using pointillism and “make it look delicious.” [Laughter.]

Below: Two examples of Gerhard’s commercial work ca. 1982 or 1983

Robinson: Is that possible?

Gerhard: Well, I gave it my best shot. But this was the sort of thing that I was doing at the time. I was also working at the art supply store and doing the deliveries. And Dave was on my route. I would drop off the Letratone that made Cerebus gray. And that’s how I met Dave. Also Deni, his wife at the time, is a sister of a friend of mine. So we met at parties and stuff too. At the time I had done a whole bunch of pen-and-ink pieces and colored them with watercolor wash on top of the pen and ink, and framed all of those up to try to do a show, and that met with, let’s call it limited success? Because it takes a long time to put all those pieces together, costs a lot of money to frame them up and takes a long time to sell them and get your money back. So I had a whole bunch of unsold pieces hanging up in the apartment. I had a party and Dave and Deni came. I was aware he was doing a comic at the time, but I wasn’t into comics at all. I had seen an issue here or there, and thought, “That’s pretty cool,” but I hadn’t got into the story or anything. And then when Dave saw these colored pieces that I had done, he mentioned that Archie Goodwin at Epic had approached him about doing some color pieces, and Dave was never big into doing color. And so he asked if he laid out the pages and inked the characters and the word balloons, would I be able to do backgrounds like this behind it? So I said, “Let’s give it a shot.”  And that’s how the Epic pieces came about. Then when he asked me if I wanted to do the backgrounds on the monthly book, I sat down with issue 1 and read all the way up to the current one, and sort of dove in from there. I read the whole thing pretty much in one sitting.

Robinson: What was your impression at the time?

Gerhard: I remember going into the studio the next day after reading them and I just started gushing. Just “I love this part, I love that part, this is great, that’s great, when he does this, when he does that …” and Dave’s just sort of rolling his eyes like “Oh, God, he’s turned into a fawning fan.” What he wanted was a collaborator. “No, no, it’s OK. I’m just saying, I’m really blown away, I’m really excited about working on this stuff.”

And he was like, “Well, let’s get to work.” [Laughter.] And of course the first few pages were just brutal. Here I am — I figure basically all I’m doing is ruining Dave’s pages. [Laughter.]

Robinson: Did that feeling last a long time?