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Jeff Smith: But I have enjoyed doing collaborations, like with Charles Vess.
Mark Askwith: Tom.
JF: Tom Stregevsky, and I've found that if it's someone you want to work with and someone
that's fun, then it's worth doing. I don't, I've never been interested in like, I'd like
to draw a Superman comic that somebody else wrote. But if Charles Vess wants to draw,
or wants to paint a fairytale that I write, well, that would actually be enjoyable. That
would be an adventure in and of itself, and it was, so that's why I like it.
MA: And you guys collaborate like crazy with each other and with other people from outside
of that. Tell me a little bit about that.
Gabriel Bá: Yeah. Well, collaborating, for us, is natural, we're always doing everything
together. Even if we're doing things separately, when we were young, we would copy each other,
so we were doing the same thing, but twice. [chuckle] So, we started making comics together
and telling our stories and we started self-publishing comics together. So, each of us would do a
simple story and would talk about the other one's story. We still do that on projects
that we work separately, talk about the drawings and, "Oh, you could do this better," and...
But, I think the most interesting thing about collaborating is that you're forced to do
better, you have to push yourself to work with another person that thinks differently
and imagine the whole scene, the whole story different than you would imagine. You have
your own tricks, your own shortcuts, to get one scene done when drawing.
GB: You have your favourite angles to tell your story, favourite compositions, and when
you're working with another writer, for example, that's how we usually do. He thinks differently,
he tells a different story that I would tell, speaks a different pacing, and I have to become
a better artist in order to put that in the page. So, I always found better, better not...
Interesting, it was always very good, all the experience that I had and Fabio had working
with other creators.
Fábio Moon: Yeah. But I think it's like Jeff said, because it's dangerous, working with
other people is dangerous.
GB: It's dangerous, yeah.
FM: Because if you don't like what you're doing with the other people then it goes completely
the other way. You become a worse artist 'cause you're not inspired, because your not motivated
and... So it's very, for us at least, it was very tricky to pick other people to work with,
and sometimes it works well. Very little times when we were very young it didn't work because
we weren't ready, because it requires you to be prepared to think inside the other person's
mind and that's...
JS: Do you think it's harder to draw something that someone else has written or to write
something that then someone else would draw?
GB: I think writing for somebody else, it's worse.
JF: Really?
GB: Yes. Because you have to write so much.
[laughter]
GB: If you're writing for yourself or if you're just reading, it's fine, just have to worry
about drawing with you, for writing for another one, then you have to explain all the angle
and all the...
JF: But if you're drawing something that someone else wrote, they don't think about how to
make your job easier at all. They'll make people talk in one order on one panel, and
then this next panel they'll talk in different orders. And all of a sudden you've got to
make word balloon arrows. Is my voice going echo-y there?
S?: Yeah, I hate writers.
[chuckle]
MA: Well, those are technical challenges, but I'm interested that you obviously find
solutions in other people's work. Who's work is influencing you and providing solutions
for you? Jeff, obviously, for you, it's strip people and people like Herman and Charles
Schultz who did "Peanuts". You can speak, Jeff.
JF: Well, my best story about collaborating would be with Charles Vess on "Rose" where
we... We started the story of Rose, which is sort of like a prequel to "Bone", it's
a story of old Grandma Ben when she was 16, and it's the first time she had a run in with
the dragon and made some bad decisions. And I was... Charles Vess was visiting me in Ohio
and we were walking through this ravine, in this state park called Old Man's Cave, which
I have a place called Old Man's Cave in the comic book and it's based on that, and I was
giving him a little tour through this place, and I said, "oh yeah, this one has inspired
me when I was a kid. I just wanted to tell stories about this place." And so that's kind
of what 'Bone' became, and I was saying, I always thought over there that's where grandma
Ben would have received her training to be given the gift of the dreaming from the dragons
and all that kind of stuff. And while I was just telling him all the story. All of a sudden,
he just stops and he goes... And this was just a back story in my mind, you know what
I mean?
JF: I never meant to do this as a comic book, this was just a story of grandma Ben and how
she screwed up and set things into motion that became the 'Bone' story. Well he stops
me and says, "I just want to paint that. I want to paint that story." And I was like,
"Well okay, great." Then jump ahead about three years, we go through the whole process
of trying to write it, work out all the details, and there was an ending to the story which
if you've read 'Rose', it's pretty... It's a brutal ending. It's very... I wanted to
go straight up Grimm's Fairy Tales. And Charles knew about it, I was bouncing ideas off him
the whole time, and Charles has a great encyclopedic knowledge of myth and fantasy and fairy tales
so it was really a wonderful process of just bouncing it back and forth. But at some point
I had to sit down and write the comics so that he could paint them. And we got into
the very last pages...
FM: And you actually laid them out as well?
JF: Yeah, when I write my scripts don't look like a screenplay or something like that.
FM: We could learn from this. You see you don't have to write and write and write.
JF: I'm sure they do. What do your scripts look like? Do they look like comics or do
they look like screen plays?
S?: It depends on the project. Sometimes if we have to show the scripts to the editor,
then we have to write more...
JF: I hate editors. [laughter] One of my editors is in the audience. Shh. [chuckle] I love
you David, I hate all the other ones. So anyway, so I get to the last part and it's the part
where this is a very brutal section where it's almost like a Sophie's Choice. Rose has
to, she's made a deal with the dragon and she has to kill, and this is a spoiler so
if you haven't read it I'm about to ruin it for you. The dragon says, "I will tell you
how to save the day but you have to kill the first living creature you see." That's the
deal, it's part of the balance of the dreaming. It's the deal you have to make. So the first
living person that she sees is her sister, who is the evil, the evil bad guy and she
can't do it. So she chickens out and decides instead of killing my sister I'll kill one
of my dogs, and the dogs were actually characters in the book.
JF: So okay this was the plan the whole time and that's what we agreed on, and I was flying
somewhere I was going to a show. I was in Singapore or something in the airport and
I remember finding the business office and faxing the last seven pages to Charles Vess
and it was probably the middle of the night in Virginia. And he called me like three hours
later and he was like furious, because what had happened was I chickened out. I couldn't
have Rose kill the dog. I decided that that was too harsh, and that the dog would sacrifice
itself, offer itself and sacrifice itself and I could handle that, I could sleep a little
better. So that's the pages I sent to him. He called me up and says, "What are you doing?
That's not how the story ends." I said, "Yeah, I know it just sounds a little much that she
kills the dog. It's heartbreaking." And he goes, "She kills the dog. Your gonna do it,
your gonna redraw those things and your gonna fax them to me now."
[laughter]
JF: I'm in Singapore airport and I'm like, "Okay." And I did it and that is... I rewrote
it the way we had originally planned it and I wouldn't have had the guts to do it on my
own if Charles hadn't insisted that this was old school fairy tales and it had to be rough
and it had to be bloody and there had to be guilt to make this... Rose had to make a mistake
or else Bone couldn't happen. And so I'm very grateful to Charles for having a backbone
because I couldn't do it, I was not gonna be able to do it.
MA: You guys have a story like that, have you collaborated with somebody whose done
that to you?
GB: Oh, well. Not that dramatic. [laughter] Not that dramatic. We are constantly complaining
to each other because we work together and right in front of each other, so we always
look at each other's work in pencil stage. And we always know when there's a lazy panel,
when you are lazy or you are tired and you try to do it faster.
FM: Even if you spent three hours on that lazy panel.
[chuckle]
GB: But it started wrong and it's crooked and the perspective doesn't work. And it's
not dynamic as it should be and everybody who draws comics knows that, but nobody has
somebody right next to him to tell and we have. So we always do tell so it's always
this is bad, this could be better.
JF: That is brutal.
[chuckle]
GB: Yeah. And I think if we had tighter deadlines, we wouldn't be able to redraw stuff so much
but we don't, so we redraw as often as we can because it always get better even understanding
that some panels, they are what they are supposed to be and that's a... I don't know, a reflect
of that day or that month or that period because it always can get better so you have to let
go a little. But there's a limit to that let go, so, we are always complaining about each
other's work.
JF: Do you, guys, draw... Do you guys, like... I've never asked you this before so I'm...
I almost can't tell like if you, guys, draw on each other's comics. Do you or do you like
to say, "No, I'm drawing this set of pages" or whatever.
FM: We... Usually, we try to decide one of us to draw a whole story just for the style
to be the same and the arts would be invisible. But some stories can feature two kinds of
drawings, two sets of styles. That happened on that BPRD we did with Mike Mignola where
I do the more real world stuff and Fabio does the fantastic stuff. And...
JF: There was one story in here where you, guys, just both did your own version of the
same story.
GB: Yeah.
JF: That was really cool.
GB: Oh yeah. That's on Details also.
FM: That's was actually a script we wrote for a friend of ours and he never did the
story. So we got pissed off and we said, "You're not going to do the story, we're going to
do two versions." [laughter] So you can see how it's just a matter of sitting and drawing,
and it's done.
S?: Yeah.
MA: Let me ask you, both of you, or all three of you, I should say, have all worked in what
we could generally define as fantasy. And what fascinates me is that in North American
comics, 80% of the market is super heroes and while you, guys have dabbled in that with
Hellboy and with Shazam, most of your work has been horror-based or fairy tale-based
or fantasy-based, so why have you, guys, chosen that path?
JF: Jump in boys.
GB: Yeah. I think, for me was two things, were the books that I read when I was growing
up in Brazil. And also some music that we used to listen, there were always lyrics about
people and how they relate, and in music, it's all very straightforward and more poetic.
You can tell a lot with less which you can't really do in comics, not as powerful. If you
want to get a message in, you have to do like Day Tripper, 200 pages and not a five-minute
song. But you can be, you can do a very strong five-minute song because you're writing poetry.
So, that's the kind of stuff that I think inspired us to tell stories to reach to people
to inspire them as well. But we loved to draw and we loved comics and we never thought it
would be, it was something that it couldn't be done in comics. So once we started discovering
comics that were more like that, we were more excited. Just like discovering Jeff's comics
and all other things that were not as super. That's it.
MA: While you're your best-known for the Fantasy of Bone. To me, one of the really interesting
fantasies was what you've been doing in in Rassel because, to me, it is science fiction
but it's a couple of other genres thrown in as well. You're dealing with historical fantasy,
some real historical stuff and in a way this thing that I would call tech Noir as well.
So... Tell me about putting together that hybrid.
JF: Well, I kind of dog tailing with your last question. I found that there's in-fantasy
or the fantastic. There is a set of symbols that you can play with that spanned whole
lifetimes. So, the reason... It's hard for me to put this in words so let me struggle
with it for a second. I tried to write stories that can be read as a youngster, a kid can
read it. But that same person can grow up and read it as a teenager or in college, even
as an adult. And these symbol should still operate, but just at a different level. They
should still operate but at that point, the reader will... It'll open up a different piece
of luggage for them, so to speak. And I just find that fantasy and mythology or the fantastic,
is one of the richest kinds of storytelling for using this kind of symbolism.
JF: And a very simple example of the kind of symbolism I'm talking about is, like, water.
Water, when it's used intentionally in a story, represents the fantastic, whether you know
it or not. Even if you've never heard anybody say that before, if you're reading a King
Arthur legend and the knights are in the middle of deep dark forest and suddenly came across
a fountain surround by 12 virgins, you know something is going to happen, something but
it's going to happen. And what it is, it represents the fantastic, something beyond our normal
world and that's because water in dreams means that kind of stuff to us 'cause we're made
of water, etcetera. Was that good? Or do you wanna hear...
MA: No, that's good, but it's funny because both Day Tripper and Rassel to me, one of
the things which is not working on it, well, wasn't working on a symbolic level for me
but I guess could have been was this idea of being able to transfer from one place to
another. Portal stories, and stories of alternate dimensions, I mean why did you guys use that
in Day Tripper?
GB: Well it's I think it wasn't hard to explain Day Tripper when we were ***, in Vertigo,
so it's going to keep being very hard. But it's not as much as a different reality, but
it's how you think on the possibilities of something and how to make people think about
different possibilities while telling one big story. So you have to create, you have
to make something break.
GB: See, if everything is very straight forward, everything is very normal, and Day Tripper
is a very normal story about very normal, daily lives, then people they're more propelled
to forget about the details of the story. So you have to make something break. It's
like when you are holding a pencil, and you're writing? You forget about the pencil, you're
only writing, you only remember you're holding a pencil when the pencil breaks and you have
to sharpen it again.
GB: So something has to break in a normal story and it can be the way you structure
the story. It can be something that happens over and over that doesn't happen usually
in normal life. It can be that somebody dies, and in the next chapter he's not dead anymore.
It's not something that you are going to explain, but it's something that it's going to make
people think while they are reading. Because it doesn't make sense, something else has
to make sense. And I think that's how we can work with the fantastic, or we can work with
the strange, is to make people notice what's not strange and to make people notice what
we are really talking about, which in Day Tripper is not about how the character dies,
it's how the character lives and in other stories is not about how we draw... How the
character... There's a character who meets himself in the bathroom and it's not about
meeting himself in the bathroom. It's about the choices you make and how the choices you
make influence how your story goes next.
[pause]