And… If you don’t remember, Tim Bradstreet did the cover for the Q4 issue of Zedura Magazine last year, showing off his love for Walking Dead. He doesn’t live too far from me in San Diego County, but we ended up chatting on the phone about comics, movies, the industries, and a lot of other things… Enjoy!
Tim Bradstreet’s love and history in comics and film
By Erik Hendrix
Work in Progress version of Tim Bradstreet's Walking Dead Cover
It’s not very often you get to have a chat with someone who you’ve been watching for almost twenty years, and when I say chat, I mean on the phone, shooting the breeze, and, well, forgetting that you’re supposed to be writing a feature on the person. That’s what happened with Tim Bradstreet and I when we hopped on the phone for an interview. Let me explain… Back in the early 90’s, I was a lowly bookseller working at a book store by day and playing RPG’s at night and on the weekends. One day, these glossy green books with a rose on the cover showed up on a bed of popcorn foam. That was my introduction to Vampire: The Masquerade. Although I never played the game (couldn’t convince my friends to switch from the RPG’s they were used to), I picked up a copy of the White Wolf published book because of one thing ~ the artwork. Within the pages of the rulebook were image after image of these modern vampires who could be standing next to you in a club, at the stool next to you at the bar, and you’d never know it. Those images, matched with a unique world of clans of vampires, powers, and politics, helped usher in a new age of vampire novels and other material. Even the Blade movies owe a nod to White Wolf’s Vampire the Masquerade. Now, in the second decade of the new millennium, Tim Bradstreet is a busy man, creating covers for DC and Marvel, working on his own creator-owned projects, getting behind the scenes working on films, and much more.
When I was setting up my interview with Tim, Kevin Knight (photographer whose pics you’ll see all through this issue, as a matter of fact) tells me “you can’t do an email interview with this guy, you HAVE to do it on the phone. You’ve gotta talk to him.” Needless to say, he’s a fan, but he was right on the money… So, on a relaxed afternoon, I called the man himself at his studio in Southern California, eager to dig into my slew of questions. Things didn’t go according to plan as we instantly tangented off into various directions. What I learned along the way, however, was that besides being a world-class artist, adorning countless covers over the last number of years, he is also a film fan and engrained in the world of film.
For a quick overview on Tim’s history, he explains what got him going in the first place. “When I was a lot younger, I was a voracious comic reader… From seven to twenty five, that whole block of time, I was consumed with comics, I was a student of the game and I could tell you who inked what and which penciler did what… My tastes started with superheroes and has since evolved.” From those early days, he wanted to get into comics, but he didn’t have the confidence to do it. That’s where role-playing games come in. “I was in high school and I played D&D occasionally with some friends right up the street. We’d do it after school in the evenings… The guy who ran the games had a really fertile mind and had a really wonderful voice as a person, so it’d be like having your game narrated by James Earl Jones in a way. It was a unique experience that got me into gaming, through this specific special person… We’d be looking through the rulebook and I’d be drawing everybody’s characters. I thought, ‘I could do that. I may not be able to do comics, bu I can do this and I bet I can get paid for it.’ I didn’t have any kind of real break until I ran into a comic book artist at a comic store maybe a year or two later and he introduced me to another guy illustrating a role-playing game, illustrating interiors and covers. Steve Venters was his name. Steve introduced me to his clients and he used to run a commercial art business. He taught me the ropes of freelancing and I impressed him enough with my ability that he handed over one of his jobs to me because he didn’t want to do interiors anymore. That’s where I broke in. That was Game Designer’s Workshop in 1986, the year after I graduated from high school.”
From GDW, working on the game Twilight 2000, he hopped over to FASA, working on the hit role-playing game Shadowrun. With the new gig, he also switched up his style, taking a step closer to the style he became known for, photo-realism. The switch, he believes, was made stronger because of his prior experience in other styles. “Anyone who starts by drawing over photographs, I think suffers, because they haven’t figured out certain things. It’s certainly harder to figure out stylizations. If you’re just tracing over a photograph and you’re tying to make it as close to the photograph as possible, then at the end of the day, why not just use the freaking photograph? You have to bring a certain amount of stylization to it. At the beginning [with Shadowrun], they were based to create a character off of. Very often, they would just be a person in street clothes who I would create everything else on them to make them more dynamic, put a gun in their hand, all of that stuff… Not only did I start my own style, but [Shadowrun] was my first big game. My work over the course of the next year or two on Shadowrun is what got me an invite to work on Vampire.”
White Wolf, the publisher of Vampire: The Masquerade, at the time was only doing a game called Ars Magica and publishing White Wolf Magazine, a general gaming magazine. “Mark Rein-Hagen sent me this letter, ‘Mr. Bradstreet, would you please draw our game,’ kind of thing, and they wanted to pay me the princely sum of $50 per finished page.” He did manage to negotiate a higher rate, but, in hindsight, he says, “what I should really have done is negotiate for some back-end, because the whole book was lightning in a bottle, the whole concept of Vampire: The Masquerade was huge. It turned White Wolf from a garage company to a multi-million dollar company.” It also put Tim Bradstreet on the map as a new artistic talent. The photo-realistic style, matured from his days working on Twilight 2000 and Shadowrun “gave that whole thing credibility. There’s no other way around it… For my part, when I did those pieces on Vampire, it was the right job at the right time. At the time that I created those, it was the best work I had ever done. I was able to tap into the things I loved from Shadowrun… the realistic things that I was really into because I was seeing film in my head, and combined them with dark portraiture and a genre element that I liked even more… This was horror and I didn’t have to be overt about it. If you look at my drawings, there’s maybe a third of them you can see canine teeth. The fucking book says Vampire on it, we know they’re vampires, we don’t have to show their mouths open in every shot. My whole angle was to do this dark portraiture and it just struck a chord in me as I was working on it. I was finally doing my own photography.”
Success, however, came with a price. Using photographic references for artwork, especially when tapping into the world of comics, is a touchy subject. “Today,” he explains, “it’s a lot more accepted than when I first started. I came under a lot of fire when I broke into the comic industry because… the industry [is] very purist and I was an illustrator who happened to be working in the comics field. People would really come after me. For every fan that loved what I did, there was another that was like, ‘you just trace photos’… There’s so much more to it and so much of yourself that comes out of it, too. If I gave the same photograph that I did with the big, famous vampire piece that I did to ten different artists, you’re going to get ten extremely different visions from that thing. They’d all be hanging on the same skeleton, but they’d be different in every sense… Whenever you try something different in a medium that’s not used to that stylized look, you’re going to have your share of detractors.”
Countless books within the Vampire universe later, Bradstreet was a hot commodity in the comic community as well as the gaming industry. His big break came from Vertigo, however. “Unknown Soldier was my big break. Now yes, I had done Hard Looks and I had been doing covers at Dark Horse and I had done some other cover work, but when Axel Alonso called me and asked me to do Unknown Soldier, that was my first introduction to Axel, which lead to Hellblazer, which lead to the Punisher. When I was offered [Unknown Soldier], I shit my pants. I was in sixth grade, my teacher brought in Unknown Soldier. I had never seen it before and… he had Star Spangled War with Kubert’s Unknown Soldier in there. I lost my mind… I stole them and took them home with me… I was such a huge fan of Kubert and such a huge fan of that character, I could not have gotten a better phone call.” That phone call lead, as he said, a lot of other work over at DC/Vertigo. Bradstreet became a mainstay doing covers for Hellblazer for over eighty issues and that same relationship lead to him working on both Marvel’s Punisher series with Marvel Knights and Punisher MAX. He recalls, “when Jimmy Palmiotti first offered me that job, I said, ‘this is a no-brainer, you’re talking about a dark character who wears a skull on his chest and shoots people. Ummm, my whole career has been leading up to this.’”
Over time, Tim’s style evolved, as any artist’s tends to do. His experimentation with hyper-realism, he feels, may have cost him his job on Hellblazer. “I don’t think I would have been on the book indefinitely, but… A) they needed a change up on the book to increase sales, and that I had already been doing it for seven years and B) Karen [Berger, editor in chief of Vertigo] had fallen out of love with what I was doing. Originally, I was doing all of this hand-painted stuff and then I went to digital color and then it went to me going a little more hyper-real with the character and she’s just not as much into that and it’s her line… and that’s her call. It’s too bad for me because I really loved working on Hellblazer and I’d still be doing it if I had my way.” Does he regret the evolution in style? Absolutely not. “I have to evolve and if my predilection is to head in this direction, I have to follow my instinct and see where it leads. Sometimes it leads nowhere and you switch gears and you find a look or you just keep doing what keeps you passionately into it. You have to have fun with it.” The Punisher book with Marvel Knights, unfortunately, had a period of time where Tim just wasn’t really into it. It had become a chore “mainly because I had no art direction, I had no editor. I didn’t get scripts. My art direction was, a week before the cover was due, ‘the cover’s due in a week,’ and that was the input I got while I was working on Marvel Knights. So, the work started to suffer because I was… I was having a lot of fun with it and then all of the sudden, I’m doing the Punisher and I had to do the same thing again and I have to think of a way to reinvent what I was doing. Then when the movie was announced, I had a new passion and I think the last half-dozen covers I’m very proud of.”
Confident he would follow Punisher into the MAX line, he was a little surprised that things weren’t so cut and dry on the Marvel side. He called Axel, who at this point was working over at Marvel, “an editor who I always had a great rapport with creatively, and Axel said, ‘yeah, Tim, I’m not too sure because the Punisher covers on Marvel Knights haven’t been too impressive.’ I’m like, ‘Huh? Wait a minute, I really want to do this.’ I knew what the MAX line was, it was gong to be kind of uncensored Punisher, and I knew that they were going to make him older, and I knew Garth was going to write it straight, and I said, ‘come on, I have to be part of this… listen, Axel, the thing you don’t understand is that I had no art direction. I had nobody over there,’ and I told him.’ In the end, Axel decided to stick with Tim as long as he brought his A-game to every cover and they planned to do more storytelling covers. “I said, ‘dude, please, sign me up.’ It’s like he was reading a list of requirements I was all too ready to agree with, not because I wanted the book so bad, but because I knew that it wasn’t going to be an issue. I like to be left alone on certain things, but I also love when I work with an editor who really knows what he’s doing an d can bring out the best in me and challenge me. Axel’s one of those guys. The last thing I said to him was, ‘dude, come on, it’s us. You know that I can respond to you in this dynamic, so put your faith in that, and let’s make some magic.’ And so he hired me. If it hadn’t been for that conversation… I probably wouldn’t have ever gotten that gig. It ended up being the thing that really put me on the map in the comics industry… I think I’ve done over 115 Punisher covers, twelve on Welcome Back Frank, thirty-seven on Knights, and sixty on MAX, and then all the one-shots.”
Punisher not only paved the way for his comic book success, but also his delving into film. Without his work on Punisher, the film likely would never have been made, nor would another series of events have been likely to follow. “When Jonathan Hensleigh was approached to direct Punisher, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it because the stuff they showed him was the old Punisher in his white boots and spandex. The reason he decided to do it, he told me point blank, ‘I wouldn’t have taken the job if I hadn’t seen your covers, because that’s when I got my head around the character. I thought, oh, THAT guy I can wrap my head around, I can see that,’ and the same thing was true of Tom Jane. He wasn’t going to take the role because he thought it was silly. He’s a comic book freak, from the time he was young, but he had never seen my Punisher covers because he had been out of Punisher for a while. When they showed him that, he went, ‘uh, I want to do that.’” If you’ve seen the film, you’ll realize that Tim Bradstreet’s covers plus the storyline Welcome Back Frank lead directly to Thomas Jane doing the Punisher.
The Punisher movie was Tim’s first intro to Thomas Jane, the actor who plays him in the film. “I had drawn him before on Crow: City of Angels, but I didn’t know who he was then. In fact, I didn’t really know who he was when he was cast as the Punisher… I was going to do posters, Lion’s Gate scheduled the photo shoot… We hit it off well during the shoot, it was fun, but we didn’t really get to that next square until Tom was promoting the Punisher and he was doing comic book store signings all around the country and when he got to California, we did a couple of signings together, and one night when he was here in town… he invited me to his hotel for dinner, and he launched into the story of Bad Planet. And that’s where our whole comic book publishing thing started.” The publishing “thing” became RAW, with the two working hand in hand on several projects including Bad Planet. With that, Tom explained to Tim that he wanted to work with a comic book writer. “The first person I thought of was Steve Niles… It was months later we realized Tom was from Baltimore, Niles was from DC, and I’m from Baltimore. So, somehow, all these years later, we all collide here in California. It’s kind of strange… Steve and Tom really hashed the story out and got it written up and I came in to bring in the artists to work on the book and myself… The thing about RAW; it’s not about the money… It’s more about the art and more about the passion for what we do.”
And Raw’s not just about comics either. One thing both Tom and Tim have in common aside from comics is film and the desire to create them. One of Tim’s longstanding dreams is to someday direct his own film. In the meantime, though, he’s perfectly content learning the ropes behind the scenes. His last film endeavor with Tom, which will hopefully be followed up with more when their schedules align cosmically once again is the film Dark Country. Tim describes it as “more of a Gothic, suspense, with horror elements… in 3D. We were the first live action film to use the new digital process. We weren’t the first released because it was a low-budget picture and it was in post [production] for a long time. We were the first live-action film shot that way, beta testing the equipment. When you see it in 3D, it just ups the ante… It’s kind of an EC, Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone adventure gone awry [and] in 3D it really brings that drive-in Saturday night vibe to everything, which makes the whole package much better.”
Dark Country, written by Tab Murphy about a decade ago, is Thomas Jane’s directorial debut, but Tim has a major role behind the scenes on this one. “Sony… decided to let him do Dark Country and then Tom convinced them to let him shoot in 3D, which is a major coup because they must have been really convinced that we could shoot 3D on a budget. So, Tom went to Ray Zone and Paradise Effects, who also did the 3D for My Bloody Valentine, The Hole, and Drive Angry. They really did cut their teeth on our project. They gave us a really great deal and did some outstanding work.” Tim was involved in developing the material with Tom and he “asked what I wanted to do with the film and I told him I wanted to production design it…. He went to Sony and said, ‘I want Tim Bradstreet to art direct the film.’ We had our language a little bit wrong and they said, ‘Tom, you don’t want to art direct your film?’ Well, he said, ‘I’d assume he directs the art. An art director in film is more of a guy who does the builds, who when you have a set that needs to be created, goes out and gets the set built. It’s different from the world of print media, where the art director is responsible for a visual look. The production designer is the guy who has designed the film and is the funnel to the director for the vision… You take those things and whether you’re just dressing a set or you’re building it from scratch, it’s all the vision of that person… I talked to a lot of people and I read a lot. I figured, what the heck, Tom’s cutting his teeth as a director, I’ll cut my teeth as a production designer. What you do in that instance is you end up biting off more than you can chew, especially when it’s your first run… we both probably wore a dozen different hats working on Dark Country, so it was everything from designing hotel signs, what the interior of a room would look like, to going out and photographing high resolution shots of the highway for the 3D segment.”
Diving in, they learned a lot along the way. “We had a lot prepped ahead of time, but we also did a lot on the fly. You can never be prepared enough… Tom, early on, before we were even in pre-production, hired a good buddy of ours, David Allcock, who’s a storyboard artist. He flew David over from London and he stayed over at Tom’s house and for two weeks, they sat and they pounded out the storyboards for the film. Tom had all of the storyboards and he and Ray Zone… colored-coded them for 3D… with five different colors, going through the entire book, the bible, of storyboards, so they knew what was going to be in the foreground, what was going to be in the background, all that kind of stuff. By the time we got to set, all we had to do was show these storyboards to the cinematographer and the 3D team and they had a pretty set idea of what they needed to do, and if we asked for too much, they made it happen anyway. It was pretty awesome… It was guerrilla style, man, we were a film production, we had trucks and lights and frames and all of the things a movie has, but we were out in the desert on Indian reservations in New Mexico out in these rural places in the middle of October and November where it would get windy and cold. It was a brutal shoot.” Still, though, Bradstreet considers it an “invaluable experience” and the pair plan to get another one going when their schedules match up once more.
Their next biggest adventure, he hopes, will be something called Devil’s Commandos, which came about from another of Tim’s hats… creator… “It’s a story by me and then the screenplay by Todd Farmer [writer of the film My Bloody Valentine] and Tom will star and we’re looking at some directors now. I think once we have a director, we’re independently financing, but we’re going for the ceiling of independent financing, we’ve got a producer locked on who we want. So, if the world spins the right way, over the next couple of months, we should be announcing it… officially as they say.” Although the fact that Devil’s Commandos exists isn’t a guarded secret, the high concept is. What Tim does share however is that “it’s a World War II picture, it’s the Twilight Zone meets combat kind of movie. When I was coming up with the story… I sat down to knock out five concepts for Tom Jane movies and I started with the Devil’s Commandos… Well, I never got past Devil’s Commandos. I just sat down and wrote like a thirty page treatment that night; it just came flying out of me. I showed them to Todd, who’s a wonderful screenwriter, and he said, ‘holy shit, this is amazing!’ He came out of his pants, man! So, that gave me confidence, so I showed them to Tom and he went, ‘oh my God, this is brilliant, this is awesome!’ I said, ‘I showed them to Todd,’ and he said, ‘well, ask Todd if he wants to write it,’ and he said, ‘let’s do it.’ That’s kind of how it started.” Begging for hints about the story, he poses the question, “When you think of horror in World War II, what’s the first thing you think of? Nazis, right? Everyone who does a WWII horror movie, got to have Nazis. There’s no Nazis in this one, it’s Pacific Theater. That’s about all I can say… Tom is Sgt. Rock and we’re going to be in the Pacific Theater, and hell ensues. That’s what we got up next.”
From RPG’s to comics to films, Tim Bradstreet has experienced a level of success many would dream of, but he’s never content to limit himself. He hopes to direct his own films someday, but if it’s not in the cards, he’s perfectly content to get involved in films as he can. “I may never get to direct a movie, but who cares? I’m not looking to build a career directing movies, I just want to do it, I want to try it sometime. If not that, just being involved in what that final outcome is. Tim has been nothing if not humble with his success, which, in part is due to luck, skill, hard work, and just getting to know the right people, including his good friend and often muse, Thomas Jane. “Tell me I’m not lucky that as an illustrator, if I’m Martin Scorsese, he’s Robert DeNiro. I cast Tom as characters. I do a lot because he’s a chameleon in a lot of ways, he can play those characters.” Tim has cast Tom as Punisher, Hellblazer, Cal MacDonald (from the Steve Niles books), and even El Borak, based on the Robert E. Howard character, who Tim is extremely honored to be able to illustrate. “Only Gary Gianni, Mark Shultz, Justin Sweet, Frank Frazetta… only a few rare individuals get an opportunity like that and I don’t know how I lucked into it, but I convinced them I could do it based on this Lawrence of Arabia drawing I had done and I illustrated Robert E. Howard’s El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Del Rey put out late last year.”
It’s a chicken and the egg argument, but if you throw temporal mechanics out the window, Tim’s golden touch very well could have lead to many a motion picture and TV series… Vampire: The Masquerade, which owes a huge debt of gratitude to his work, helped to usher in a revolution in Vampire mythology, a TV series, and plenty more. Blade, which Tim was officially was brought in on for the second film, took a cue from his work on Vampire as well. When Guillermo del Toro asked Tim Bradstreet to work on the film, “he saw the first Blade movie, he said they ripped me off. And I got that call from a lot of people… So, I’m working on Blade 2 and I’m working with David Goyer, who also wrote the screenplay for the first one. He turns to me one afternoon while we’re reading through the script and he says, ‘you know, we had your Vampire portfolio and your art book when we were shooting the first movie. In the pre-production room you were the kind of thing we were shooting at.’” Running down the line, his work on Human Target could very well have assisted in the TV series coming about, Constantine may not have happened without his countless covers, etc… Even Criminal Macabre, the Steve Niles book about Cal MacDonald, has sold the movie rights; nevermind that it’s a Steve Niles book and is written well. Tim concedes, “that will really ring true if [Thomas] Jame gets cast as Cal MacDonald… then I’ll take some credit for that… partial credit.” As I said, temporal mechanics aside, he has also worked on Star Wars, and we know how big a hit that has been. Maybe there’s something to it!
Steve Niles Tells all on Comics, Horror, and being Steve
By Erik Hendrix
In a dimly lit, dusty, and truly old school comic store called Comic Kitchen in Oceanside, CA, in 2004, the owner, a quintessential comic encyclopedia, passed me a signed copy of a 30 Days of Night trade paperback. He received a copy, one of a few thousand randomly sent out as a “thank you” for the success of the book to that point. Not familiar with the book, but a huge fan of vampire fiction, I quickly flipped through the pages, filled with flashes of terror, violence, and teeth. It didn’t take long for me to pick it up, get home, and devour it. Never before had vampires on the comic book page been handled as well. In a modern era of vampires, sexually ambiguous and androgynous thanks to the success of Anne Rice, this was a slap in the face to modern convention. Vampires SHOULD be feared.
This was my first introduction to Steve Niles.
Several years later, 30 Days of Night has been cemented into comic book history, spawning sequels, a movie, and novels, all tied somehow to the unfortunate town of Barrow, AK. But that’s certainly not all Steve Niles has to offer the world. Stretching back to 1991, Steve has been blessing (or cursing) us with his own brand of twisted genius, adapting the novella I am Legend into a comic book over a decade before Hollywood hijacked the story into film (not the first time, though, because we must remember Omega Man from the 70’s, too). Criminal Macabre, Hellspawn, Remains, Freaks of the Heartland, Wake the Dead, Bad Planet, Simon Dark, Epilogue, City of Dust, and, most recently, Mystery Society and October’s Edge of Doom have all shown us the darkness inside… Now it’s time to find out how the mind behind them all works.
Without boring you with details, Steve’s creative history started… with Music. In the 80’s, when the majority of the United States felt safe in the embrace of new wave and what followed, there punk, the hardcore remnants of the late 70’s and early 80’s, actually thrived underground. At the heart of one branch of the punk movement was Dischord Records, which was the official label of the D.C. Underground. Steve, a music nut, likely from conception, grew up in Virginia, but “the first thing I did when I turned seventeen was move to D.C. and immediately wanted to meet up with those guys. I was lucky enough to get involved in the scene and start playing with those guys. Very lucky… It was about the time there were bands like Embrace, Rites of Spring, things like that. We were just a little bit before that stuff and during it.” Steve was in the bands Grey Matter and Three back in those days.
Even while playing the circuit, he was a fan of comic books and plotted his future works. Raised on horror, after trying his hand at making Super 8 movies, he “segued into doing comic books and it took a while. I did the band thing for about ten years, I guess, or maybe a little more, and I as doing comic books all through that.” They’re rare, but if you look hard enough, you may be able to track down some of his early work. “One of the first books I did was called Fly in My Eye, it was a big anthology… Even that had a Dischord ad in the back. I was still doing music when I was working for Eclipse, which is where I did I Am Legend and another book called M based on the Fritz Lang movie. In fact, that book came with a flexidisk, which me and Geoff Turner from Grey Matter and Three did… our version of In the Hall of the Mountain King.” I Am Legend, Steve’s adaptation of the Richard Matheson novella was later reprinted by IDW, and is MUCH more faithful an adaption than the Will Smith movie.
From those early days, Niles’ style was as dark as it is today, delving in the recesses of the brain. What sparks the passion for the macabre, Steve explains, is when he grew up, he “loved horror movies. I loved scaring people, I love being scared, and now it’s my turn. It’s just my imagination… I love the 50’s monster movies, the guys in the rubber suits chasing people around… I think that’s where the over the top 80’s stuff fell. I was too cool a teenager to enjoy the Nightmare on Elm Street stuff except for the first one, which I loved. What’s really funny is that the stuff that’s scary in there was the strange imagery of the sheep in the hallway of the school and his extended arms scratching the wall, and that surreal stuff they were playing with. I thought it was very frightening.”
The trick is leaving some of the scaring to the audience’s imagination, but also “you have to pick your moments. There’s definitely a time to show shocking stuff and there’s times when things are better left to the imagination. It really is a matter of picking your moments.” As an example, Steve points out that the original mini-series of 30 Days of Night, his now best known work, didn’t contain attack scenes. “The first issue ends with them basically spotting [the vampires] coming and the second issue opens with the town in mayhem and everyone in hiding already. We left that to the people’s imagination. Later on, as some bonus pages, we wrote these attack pages and then somehow it jut became part of the book and people seemed to like the graphic novel, so I didn’t complain about it… That was originally a decision we made to leave it to people’s imagination.”
The original idea for 30 Days of Night “came from a little piece in the newspaper about this town that went dark for a period of time and the fact that they didn’t sell alcohol there, which is actually because of the level of depression… I found that interesting, so I tore out the corners and wrote vampires on it and carried it around for the next ten years and tried to figure out something to do with it… I fudged the facts a bit. The higher you go, the longer it goes. It can be up to fifty-five days, but 55 Days of Night doesn’t sound good.” IDW ended up with the title when Ted Adams, the CEO of IDW, who had known Steve from his time at Eclipse and working for McFarlane, decided to do a few comics. “Ted called me and asked if I had any ideas for comics, and I sent him my rejected pitch list I had been in LA trying to pitch… and 30 Days of Night was one of the pitches… and Ted picked it out. He thought it sounded kind of cool, he found an artist, and we went from there.”
From there, Ben Templesmith, the artist, and Steve Niles took 30 Days of Night on a journey through multiple mini-series and even the successful film version of the now classic story of Barrow, Alaska. In fact, October ushers the next chapter of the 30 Days of Night series, Dark Days, onto DVD. In the theater, 30 Days of Night didn’t hit the magic number to warrant a big screen sequel, but “they did want to keep going, so we wound up with a much lower budget, but we got this wonderful up and coming director named Ben Ketai.” The end result, Steve says, is “pretty close to the comic and what I’ve seen of it, I’m very happy with… We have a lot more freedom, so to me it’s very close to the comic and we’re hoping that we’ll be able to continue [the series].” Thanks go to everyone involved with the films, who have helped to protect his vision and make it scary.
One big difference with the vampires in 30 Days of Night is that they’re decidedly scary… scarier than any vampires seen on film in recent history. As a fan of the genre himself, Steve Niles managed to take vampires and make them scary in both look and attitude and even made them somewhat inhuman, something unheard of in a modern age where Anne Rice has indoctrinated us with the vampires of her Vampire Chronicles. Every fan of horror owes Anne Rice a debt of gratitude, but it’s nice to see the other side of things. “Vampires just weren’t scary anymore, that’s the whole thing. I loved Anne Rice, I loved Louis and Lestat, I rooted for them, but they didn’t scare me at all. Then Buffy came along and treated it even lighter, and so my reaction to that was that we needed some scary vampires. I like my monsters scary. I don’t want to hang out and have tea with my monsters… It’s boring.”
Of, even more recent examples of “horror”, True Blood and Twilight, Steve admits, “I tried to watch True Blood and this is kind of a good soap opera. I’m glad there’s a horror-themed soap opera out there. Anyone who would call that a horror show, I would argue [with]… Twilight, which I have not seen or read is for kids and I’m hoping Twilight is a gateway drug to bigger and better horror… Both True Blood and Twilight have taken such license with all of the legends, and I’ve done it myself with 30 Days, but I think they’re at the point that it’s just silly.” And, we both decided, vampires should not be walking in the sun and they most certainly should not sparkle.
Steve’s influences for 30 Days reach back into the actual mythology of the vampire, predating the Bram Stoker classic, while also nodding to classics such as I Am Legend. “I loved how I Am Legend made sense of the wooden stakes. Stole that… There’s three ways you can kill a vampire in 30 Days, you burn them, cut their heads off, or the sunlight gets them. Crosses don’t make sense. Garlic, what? Huh? I know where it comes from, but it didn’t make sense , it made them less scary to me. I couldn’t have these people huddled, fearing for their lives after their town was massacred, saying somebody needs to get to the grocery store and get the garlic. And the cross is a HUGE assumption of the vampire belief system. I seriously doubt all vampires are Christian.”
By sticking with the core aspects of vampire mythology that made sense logically, it makes for a much more real story and, as a bi-product, made for a perfect match up with X-Files. “The two worlds really work because there’s a certain amount of logic to the vampires so that they can fit in the real world of the X-Files… As a matter of fact, in 30 Days and in the X-Files book, we wind up delving into talking about the actual science of what the vampires are, which is very fun… the disease changes their physiology. Many of their organs aren’t used anymore. No reason for a kidney or a liver. It makes no sense to me that the blood goes into the stomach and from the stomach it goes into the bloodstream. It seems like something has to change within the body. The disease not only gives you fangs, it kills some organs and rearranges so when the blood is ingested, it goes directly into the circulatory system. I’m no freaking scientist, so I’m just hinting at these things because they make sense to me.”
In prepping for the crossover, with the X-Files, “there were all these episodes that I really loved, but I didn’t know them verbatim, so I went out and bought a lot of the season sets and just watched tons and tons of them when we started this series to get myself back on track.” His favorites, by far, are the monster of the week episodes. “Shows like The Host, the ones with the Fluke Man, and another one called Home with the Inbred Brothers and there’s tons of them.” Working on the project with longtime friend Adam Jones, the watched episodes and wrote scripts together, passing them to the X-Files people for approval, whose intent was to protect the characters. “They would call us out and say, ‘Mulder wouldn’t say that, Scully wouldn’t say that,’ but whenever I’d get stuck, Adam and I would just load up an episode and we still do it… Scully, boy, she’s got a very particular way about her with the way she reacts to things and she’s got this great character arc within herself in that she’s basically a scientist, but she’s also a Christian… It’s such an interesting part of her because she’s the one who doubts everything, but she buys that… I love Mulder, he’s a lot easier to do, he’s so dry… I’ve been having such a blast doing this series and working with Adam has been fun.”
Continuity is key with the series, so don’t expect Mulder and Scully to become vampires at the end of the story. “We can’t do anything that shocking, but we’ve got some good surprises.” The story falls into a two year window where Mulder was on the show and also syncs up with the events in the 30 Days of Night world.
The story behind the IDW series 30 Days of Night crossing over with X-Files under the Wildstorm banner isn’t a long one. “Basically, IDW and Wildstorm came up with the idea and came to me… they offered it to me and I picked it.”
Following the mini-series, without ruining anything, Steve feels that the main characters of the book, Eben, Stella, etc, “if they’re not all dead, they’ve run their course.” That doesn’t mean he won’t play around with other characters in the same world, though. “I do have other scary vampire ideas and that is the place we’ve established scary vampires.” Fans of the series should check out the novels based in the world as well. Some are co-written by Steve Niles with Jeff Mariotte, while others, including the movie adaptation, are written by Tim Lebbon.
If you think Steve is all horror, all the time, you’d be surprised to know that his series Mystery Society, co-created by Ashley Wood, is far from the visceral horror he is known for. The first arc wraps up in October, and it’s bound to end with fans smiling the whole way through. The series includes a lot of light-hearted moments and banter between the main characters, Nick and Anastasia, which most wouldn’t expect from Niles. He jokes, “comics are very serious these days. You’re not supposed to have fun! I wanted to have some fun and some laughs. It’s been this recurring theme with me, I love functional couples and I love the way they react to each other. Mystery Society is a throwback to a lot of the old movies I love. I can even site The Thin Man, Philadelphia Story, [and] My Man Godfrey; there’s all these movies where the banter is just so amazing. The banter between Lauren Baccall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, absolutely great stuff. They’re playing with each other. I wanted a chance to do that.” Reading the pages of Mystery Society, you can certainly feel that classic influence in the pages.
The concept of Mystery Society came about because Steve and Ashley are “both fans of this old TV show called In Search Of. It’s Leonard Nimoy narrated and very much like an Unsolved Mysteries kind of thing. We wanted to do a comic like that. Not necessarily a couple looking for monsters, but all sorts of different kinds of mysteries, so we talked about that and Ashley has more work than anyone I know and he got to the point where he wasn’t going to be able to do the art, so I just happened to see Fiona [Staple]’s work in North 40 that she did for Wildstorm and immediately contacted her and asked if she wanted to do this and luckily she said yes.” The current series of Mystery Society ends with issue 5 in October, but fan reception and sales will help dictate the books future. Steve, of course, would like to continue working on the book and has plenty of things planned for the series if given the chance.
As one series ends (for a time), another begins. Edge of Doom, written by Niles with art by Kelley Jones, will be published by IDW in October. Steve explains that “there are five issues total, but they’re all interlinked, but they all work standalone and you can read them in any order. You can read issue 5 first if you want. It is fun, but this is going to be fun horror. We’re going for the jugular.” Steve has always enjoyed getting a reaction out of his audience. With the series Wake the Dead from several years ago as an example, “my editor at the time was a little bit squeamish and you really don’t want to tell me you’re squeamish because I’m a little brother, so I really love being a little fucking ass hole.. I’ll try to gross you out. And I remember with Waking the Dead, I was deliberately trying to make my editor sick.” With Edge of Doom, Steve admits, “It’s not that I’m trying to make anyone specifically sick, I’m just really having fun pushing the border a little bit. Really pushing the limit of horror in comics… What I wanted to do was some Twilight Zone episodes, 22 page, self-contained stories.” They start in the first issue with a sad and lonely man plagued by demons. “The second issue is about a guy who is marooned in space and the third is called Circus of Surgery, about an organization of mad doctors who are sick and tired of the FDA’s restrictions on experimentation, so they just kidnap people and do the experiments they’re not allowed to do… And it doesn’t end well.”
Besides his newer series, he’s always working on something else behind the scenes. Most recently, he was in Germany promoting F.E.A.R. 3, a game he co-wrote with his idol John Carpenter and he has some big plans for Cal MacDonald, too. The movie rights to Criminal Macabre were sold a while back and Steve hopes Thomas Jane will get the role. “It’s a small industry and I’ve known Timmy for years and he introduced me to Tom and we wound up doing some work together.” A frequent reference for the character on Tim Bradstreet’s covers for the Cal MacDonald books, Steve describes Tom as “a natural for Cal. In the end… casting comes down to the director and just waiting to get to that point… I think there’s a good chance, but who knows… it’s the studio and the director… Kyle Ward is working on the script right now… It’s happening, so we’ll see.”
Steve is also tied to both Tim and Tom through RAW, where he helped the pair with Bad Planet. Initially, it was “Tom’s idea and he came to me and I helped him write it and we kind of alternated writing scripts… He’s really fun to collaborate with… It’s like sitting around with your best buddies jamming on story ideas. I love that.
Steve Niles on Horror…
I watch just about any horror movie that comes out just out of sheer curiosity. I watch a lot of science fiction. Right now, I’ve been reading the last three James Ellroy novels. I love crime stuff a lot. I really try to mix it up and not stay completely immersed in the horror thing all the time. The stuff I love, I think Clive Barker and his Books of Blood really reinvigorated horror. I’m a huge Richard Matheson fan. Love Stephen King. I’ve been reading Joe Hill’s stuff. I really enjoyed Heard Shaped Box. I need to read Horns. I read the book Let the Right One In was based on, called Let Me In, and that was very good. I’m a pretty all around horror fan in that I love everything from Nosferatu to the Universal Monsters to the 50’s B-Movies, I love the 70’s stuff, Rosemary’s Baby, the Exorcist, Race the Devil, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Shockwaves, and then a lot of the modern ones, although right now I can’t think of one that quite falls in the horror category other than Let the Right One In was one of my favorite most recent horror films. It’s a Swedish movie… See it… They’re doing the American version right now and I’m not saying the American remake won’t be good, ’cause I don’t know, but I know the Swedish one is fantastic… I thought Daybreakers was freaking hysterical, I enjoyed it. That was popcorn horror and I really enjoyed it. I got talked into watching it and a lot of the setup is along the lines of True Blood, but I love what they did with it because it was taken to the extreme. 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, I enjoyed both of those. I kind of enjoyed the latest version of the Crazies. I liked the remake of Dawn of the Dead quite a bit, the Zack Snyder one… I enjoyed it because it ruined the first one. They’re two different movies as far as I’m concerned. There’s plenty of modern ones I like, too. Night of the Living Dead is still one of the scariest horror movies out there.
Steve on Steve…
That’s sort of one of the dangers that I do these standalone graphic novels is that it’s very easy for them to fade into the past. I’d love people to check out the stuff I’m doing with Bernie Wrightson, which we’re on our fourth book now. We did Dead She Said and the Ghoul for IDW and Bernie Wrightson is at the top of his game and we’re having a blast. Those are two of my favorite titles right now. Obviously Freaks of the Heartland. I wish more people would read the Cal [MacDonald] prose because Dark Horse has a thing called Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal MacDonald Stories and it’s my two novels and all the short stories. There’s a lot of stuff out there. I’ve been doing this for, yikes, almost 25 years now. Whenever I do the math in my head, I’m like, ‘good God.’ There’s a lot of stuff out there because I do always concentrate on keeping things self contained, there’s a lot of stuff to read out there. All of the Criminal Macabre stuff, a lot of stuff I’ve done at IDW is still in print. In the back of Mystery Society issue 1 they ran my catalog and I was just like, ‘no wonder I’m tired.’ Obviously I want people to read Mystery Society, but there’s all these side things. There’s Simon Dark, there are three graphic novels of Simon Dark. And all of these are just a year or two old.
Last year, Vertigo released some amazing books, including The Green Woman. I had the chance to chat with the creators, Peter Straub and Michael Easton about it and it made for some great reading… check it out…
Going Green
Peter Straub and Michael Easton on Vertigo’s The Green Woman
By Erik Hendrix
Sometimes you read about writing teams and wonder how they managed to connect in the first place, how their partnerships work, etc… Did they meet at conventions, share a home town, an agent? In the case of Peter Straub and Michael Easton, both writers who delve into darkness and successful on their own merits, for example, you might assume their shared love of the macabre or even poetry brought them together. Actually, though, it was a chance meeting on the set of the soap opera One Life to Live, which connected the two and the rest is history.
Peter Straub, Bram Stoker Award winning writer of over twenty-five books, is no stranger to collaborations. Besides his books, which have built him a reputation as one of the top horror writers of our time, he has worked with Stephen King since 1984 on a couple of books set in the same world with a third planned in the near future. With an already full dance card, however, working on his own books and a planned partnership on a third book with Stephen King, how did he manage to connect with Michael Easton?
“My wife and I,” Peter explains, “knew Michael Malone, one of the head writers [of One Life to Live] who had just left the show, and on that shaky basis Susan arranged to give me a tour of the OLTL studio as a 60th birthday present. (You may assume from this that I was and still am a freak for One Life To Live.) Before my visit to the studio, I autographed books for some of my favorite actors, one of them Michael Easton.”
Coincidentally, Michael Easton is a writer as well, best known for the gorgeously drawn Soul Stealer from DMF Comics, in addition to being a respected actor. Aside from his work on OLTL, he has been in several other shows over the years including the ill-fated Mutant X series. For the last seven years, however, he has shared his time with the character John McBain on OLTL and fitting in Soul Stealer, poetry, and screenplays as he has time.
After the chance meeting on the set, Peter says, “Michael wrote me a very nice, thoughtful letter. This kind of response led to conversations and the request from Michael that maybe I look at the graphic novel he was doing with the artist Chris Shy, Soul Stealer. Our first actual meeting, which took place at my house, concerned that book.”
On Michael’s side, one of his mother’s favorite books was Straub’s World Fantasy Award winning novel, Koko. “I remember reading it to her during her chemotherapy treatments. Fourteen years later and a world away, I receive a copy of Koko in my mailbox at the studio inscribed to me by Peter Straub. Somewhere, my mom was smiling.”
The mutual respect between the two after that initial meeting was obvious. Of Michael, Peter says, “I thought his work, and Shy’s, was very interesting. It had sort of a bruised quality I liked a lot, a moodiness that was rooted in deep injury. Of course, I also learned to like Michael enormously. He’s a fantastic man, smart, funny, fair-minded, caring, tactful, generous. A wonderful guy, now a wonderful and much-loved friend.”
“Peter’s books,” Michael reflects, “were always top shelf in my house right next to Le Carré and Henry James. Getting to work with him was like being allowed into the master’s class. As great an author as he is, he’s an even better friend.”
Known for bringing some of the best writers in the world into the fold, “When DC/Vertigo’s Jon Vankin wrote to ask if I was interested in doing something for them,” Peter says, “I suggested that he get together with Michael instead. Somehow, that would up with Michael and I talking about doing a joint project for Vankin and Vertigo. (We had an idea within about a minute and a half.) Before long, we had something in mind that sounded worthy of both our time and Vertigo’s attention.”
The Green Woman is a twisted tale following two intersecting paths, one of Fielding Bandolier, the serial killer from The Throat, the other Bob Steele, a New York detective looking to stop Fielding. Between them is the Green Woman Tavern. “We began with the character from The Throat and pretty much let it evolve from there,” Peter elaborates, “There were a lot of conversations over drinks, over drinks and dinner, at O’Neil’s, a chummy saloon near the Studio One Life was then using. We’d get together after Michael got off work for the day and just wing it. Michael had a natural gift for this kind of thing, he really does. For a time, we entered a sort of Pappy Van Winkle’s phase, when we became obsessed with the bourbon of that name, especially the fifteen and twenty year old varieties.” Michael explains that the story had “humble beginnings. A few thoughts jotted down on cocktail napkins. From there, it took on a life of its own. These were clearly inspired shots of Pappy Van Winkle…”
Their process for collaborating, partially alcohol fueled (Pappy Van Winkle could be to thank for the Green Woman Tavern locale?), went very smoothly. Peter, of course, has collaborated with Stephen King, but any new team is it’s own animal… “I think the collaboration, only my second,” Peter explains, “went along wonderfully smoothly. We just got together and hashed out the direction of the story and its details. It was Michael who came up with the idea of matching Bandolier against a flaky, obsessed cop. Brilliant. It locked the whole story into place.” Michael adds, “Fielding had been with Peter for a lifetime, ready to leap off the page. We had to give Bob life. I know a lot of cops. Best people I know… Great jugglers of demons. That’s who Bob Steele became.”
Those familiar with Straub’s books might have realized, well, didn’t Fielding die within those pages? “Oh sure, yeah, in the BOOK he dies,” Straub jokes. “Didn’t you know, there wasn’t a writer ever born who failed to turn into a lying piece of shit the moment he picked up a pencil? It’s in their contract, it’s in their DNA.”
So, with Fielding resurrected (well, at least given new life in comic form), it’s the psychopath versus the cop. As you read through the book, it almost seems like there could be a little role reversal going on between the two main characters and the Green Woman Tavern is right in the middle of it. How does the Green Woman herself play into the story? Straub fills in some blanks. “Well, all I can say is that Green Woman, once the figurehead on a ship of evil destiny and now installed in a deserted and mouldering pub in Milwaukee, has no conscience at all. She will do anything she can to achieve her goal, namely reconstruction, restoration, a healing reunion with her old ship. The wicked old thing is always after something.” Michael Easton says of the characters and their roles, “Within The Green Woman, the hard line between good and evil is easily breached. The characters of Fielding and Bob are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin.”
Art duties in the book are from John Bolton, who is no stranger to the darker side of art. He adds stunning visuals to the twisted tale. Of Bolton, Peter says that he “seemed to all three of us, Michael, Jon Vankin and I, plus Jon’s boss Karen Berger, who had been overseeing things all along, to be the perfect artist for the book. What he gave us was even more stunning than what we had anticipated, and our expectations were very high. He got the faces right, for one thing, which I see as extremely touchy, difficult matter. And the way he handled all the violence in the book is gorgeous.” Easton describes Bolton as “a visionary. We never met him in person, but it’s as if John had been occupying the bar stool next to us the whole time we wrote. Our Ghost partner.”
When you finish reading The Green Woman, and don’t expect any spoilers here, you may wonder if there are any sequels planned. Straub didn’t expect to do this book in the first place and “look where we are! But if we move on from here, my primary justification will be simply that I like having an excuse to spend extravagant amounts of time with Michael Easton.” Michael is always game for a sequel. “I’m in, make mine a double!”
Who could appear in any sequels? “As the Baltimore Catechism says, it is a mystery,” Straub says mysteriously.
From GDW, working on the game Twilight 2000, he hopped over to FASA, working on the hit role-playing game Shadowrun. With the new gig, he also switched up his style, taking a step closer to the style he became known for, photo-realism. The switch, he believes, was made stronger because of his prior experience in other styles. “Anyone who starts by drawing over photographs, I think suffers, because they haven’t figured out certain things. It’s certainly harder to figure out stylizations. If you’re just tracing over a photograph and you’re tying to make it as close to the photograph as possible, then at the end of the day, why not just use the freaking photograph? You have to bring a certain amount of stylization to it. At the beginning [with Shadowrun], they were based to create a character off of. Very often, they would just be a person in street clothes who I would create everything else on them to make them more dynamic, put a gun in their hand, all of that stuff… Not only did I start my own style, but [Shadowrun] was my first big game. My work over the course of the next year or two on Shadowrun is what got me an invite to work on Vampire.”
Success, however, came with a price. Using photographic references for artwork, especially when tapping into the world of comics, is a touchy subject. “Today,” he explains, “it’s a lot more accepted than when I first started. I came under a lot of fire when I broke into the comic industry because… the industry [is] very purist and I was an illustrator who happened to be working in the comics field. People would really come after me. For every fan that loved what I did, there was another that was like, ‘you just trace photos’… There’s so much more to it and so much of yourself that comes out of it, too. If I gave the same photograph that I did with the big, famous vampire piece that I did to ten different artists, you’re going to get ten extremely different visions from that thing. They’d all be hanging on the same skeleton, but they’d be different in every sense… Whenever you try something different in a medium that’s not used to that stylized look, you’re going to have your share of detractors.”
Confident he would follow Punisher into the MAX line, he was a little surprised that things weren’t so cut and dry on the Marvel side. He called Axel, who at this point was working over at Marvel, “an editor who I always had a great rapport with creatively, and Axel said, ‘yeah, Tim, I’m not too sure because the Punisher covers on Marvel Knights haven’t been too impressive.’ I’m like, ‘Huh? Wait a minute, I really want to do this.’ I knew what the MAX line was, it was gong to be kind of uncensored Punisher, and I knew that they were going to make him older, and I knew Garth was going to write it straight, and I said, ‘come on, I have to be part of this… listen, Axel, the thing you don’t understand is that I had no art direction. I had nobody over there,’ and I told him.’ In the end, Axel decided to stick with Tim as long as he brought his A-game to every cover and they planned to do more storytelling covers. “I said, ‘dude, please, sign me up.’ It’s like he was reading a list of requirements I was all too ready to agree with, not because I wanted the book so bad, but because I knew that it wasn’t going to be an issue. I like to be left alone on certain things, but I also love when I work with an editor who really knows what he’s doing an d can bring out the best in me and challenge me. Axel’s one of those guys. The last thing I said to him was, ‘dude, come on, it’s us. You know that I can respond to you in this dynamic, so put your faith in that, and let’s make some magic.’ And so he hired me. If it hadn’t been for that conversation… I probably wouldn’t have ever gotten that gig. It ended up being the thing that really put me on the map in the comics industry… I think I’ve done over 115 Punisher covers, twelve on Welcome Back Frank, thirty-seven on Knights, and sixty on MAX, and then all the one-shots.”
