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After the conclusion of Greendale
, Cliff Chiang returned to DC super-hero work. The first thing to arrive on the stands was an odd Supergirl back-up story co-written by Helen Slater and Jake Black. While not a particularly revelatory piece of work, the story served as a divergent "Welcome back" that laid the groundwork for one of his most publicly embraced super-hero comics to date: Brave and the Bold
#33. For Cliff, the job--a perfunctory Sex In The City
story with the patented J. Michael Straczynski "moral twist" conclusion--served primarily as a chance to prove that a two-year absence from heroes hadn't dulled his skills.
I was surprised by the response to
Brave and the Bold, because it seems like people really did love the book. I was kind of shocked--the editor, other people high up in the company, said "This is going to be big." They were so sure about it, and I didn't see how it could make a splash, really.
I'm starting to hear more from people where it wasn't really their cup of tea, and I can totally understand why. There's a way in which JMS is treating
Brave and The Bold as intellectual character exercises. He uses the book to examine an issue that he wants the character to explore. Ultimately, they're giant metaphors with the characters taking the place of certain ideas, so it's not always the most natural storytelling. But I think it can be refreshing to have a book like that, that's not event-based, not plot/plot/plot. It's important to try and say something.
One of the challenges of illustrating Brave and the Bold
was a splash page sequence at the conclusion of the comic. Taking a small panel from Brian Bolland's Killing Joke
and blowing it up to a two page spread, Cliff's rendering is rougher than anything else in the story, a distinct visual clash that adds a level of blunt cruelty to the poppy "let's have some fun" pages that precede it.
I knew the story had a fake-out involved, that the reader needed to go along with the fun stuff at the beginning of the issue and the style had to fit that. The more fun it is for the reader, the more sadistic the knife-twist is at the end. But when I got to that last spread, I thought, "What the hell am I going to do here?" Part of the challenge in the pages leading up to it was approximating the setting that [Brian] Bolland had done for
The Killing Joke. It felt disrespectful to ape Bolland, though that would have been the obvious thing to do, and it wouldn't have been convincing anyway. I realized that the spread needed to have a different kind of reality, so I inked it a bit rougher, with more hatching, like Jorge Zaffino. I don't think I've ever done anything that's been published that had that kind of rendering to it. That's why I drew it that way, to try and surprise people on another level. You needed to feel violated somehow, with this pervy-looking guy at the door and this fully-rendered style coming after twenty pages of cleaner art.
Make no mistake: Brave and the Bold
doesn't read like a "Cliff Chiang comic" in the same way that Dr. 13
, Human Target
or Beware the Creeper
do. As with all of Straczynski's work on the title, it's geared towards an engagement with the reader's knowledge of DC's past while "maturing" superhero stories with the same sort of earnestness that Dr. 13 might have reacted to with confusion. The portion of the issue where Cliff's voice most shines through isn't in the story's macabre finale, but earlier, when his depiction of the issue's protagonists (Wonder Woman, Batgirl & Zatanna) in stylish club wear delivers a sense of outlandish humor that the leaden dialog all but ignores.
I actually read on the internet where some dude was saying "Batgirl's dress might be a little out of date", and it's NOT. It's this season, and it's not going to be in next season. It'll be done. I try to research stuff like that, and my ace in the hole when it comes to fashion is my fiancee, who used to be a comics editor, so she knows what's going to work. So I said to her, "I gotta think about these dresses, but I'm dealing with so much other shit right now. Would you mind looking?" And she was like "sure!" so she put together a list of 14 screen shots of different dresses. Then I went through to pick what worked best on the page. Even down to the color, Batgirl's bandage dress is exactly what's on the rack. It's all referenced, down to the shoes. Fashion is always horrible when you make it up. You've got to be specific. It's not worth trying to recreate something from scratch, because you're not going to do it right, and it's going to look like 80's John Byrne comics where everybody is wearing generic versions of stuff. Fashion is all about the details, the little things, and you can win someone over on that kind of level. Whenever my friends and I are looking over comics, we're always disappointed when someone doesn't take that extra step. It's just stupid: you should have done it! If you have any sort of pride in what you do, if you don't go that far, you're going to end up with an audience that doesn't care. Even if 90% don't appreciate the reference, the 10% that do...that's who I'm drawing for.
It's easy to roll one's eyes at the idea of taking a random one-issue stint on a super-hero comic with so much gravity of importance, but doing so neatly ignores the way in which freelance artists have to spend their time. Unlike their writing counterparts, artists aren't going to flood the shelves with multiple comics a week; time won't allow it. People like Cliff--artists exclusive to one company, leaping in and out of relationships with specific writers, forced to re-structure their own creative process--have to depend upon themselves to find a way to engage with jobs they may or may not enjoy during a time period when their audience seems more concerned with story than anything else.
It's a struggle that's dealt with through a variety of methods. Some artists share studio space, giving them the freedom to kvetch amongst one another while enforcing a sense of camaraderie and friendly competition, others become the drunken celebrities of fan-centric barhopping parties, and some turn to compulsive gambling--whatever it takes to prevent creative burnout or "this sucks" bitterness. For Cliff, working against those kinds of obstacles has resulted in a self-constructed network of ideals. The bluntness with which he describes his work ethic reveals an integrity of purpose, one that's all the more compelling because of his unfashionable sincerity.
When I work on something, I want it to be good, I want there to be some kind of reaction to it. But it's a lot of weight when you know there are another 80 books coming out that week that aren't good. How can we raise the general level? It's hard because I think you've got a lot of people that aren't interested in storytelling, not interested in form, not interested in their legacy...and to me, those three things are dangerous. That leads to hackwork. And there are a lot of guys that are just making a paycheck. And that bothers me. That offends me. But then again, I'm a young guy and I don't have a family to support.
I can't "read" a lot of comics right now. They don't track for me. The work separates: I'm seeing the script the guy wrote, I'm seeing how the other guy interpreted it, and I'm seeing how it doesn't come together. And that's miserable, you know?
When I read things, lately I need them to be so far out of my wheelhouse in order for me to appreciate them. They have to be really good or else so foreign to me that I don't think about how I would have drawn them. I'm learning to accept how other people would do things and not just use how I would do things as criteria. You have to judge a book on its own terms. It's not fair otherwise.
When the conversation with Chiang turns to focus on the comics he's currently enjoying, the references quickly head in one direction: the one man show. Whether its Jaime Hernandez or Chris Blain, Naoki Urasawa or Gipi, the comics he's most excited to talk about are almost invariably the product of the individual writer/artist. When he begins to define what it is he likes about those comics, it doesn't take very long before you begin to question whether his plans to "take control over my career" don't include writing the scripts himself.
Reading
Pluto, I saw a lot of the way that I would LIKE to do comics, which is great. It was really inspiring in a way that I haven't felt since I read
Batman:Year One. There was a lot in there that kept coming back to me, really human moments, storytelling that wasn't what I expected. The books that spoke to me the most, recently, were
Pluto and those Gipi books --
Notes for A War Story, Garage Band.
Now I feel like I've gotten more control over inking, and over drafting in general. I feel like I have to go back and push myself again, to loosen up and work faster. I have to trust that it's going to be good enough. No matter how much time I spend on something, it's never going to look like Adam Hughes or someone like that. Jordi Bernet is always going to look like Jordi Bernet. Joe Kubert is never going to look like somebody else. Those are the guys that I look up to, but I'm a little more schizophrenic. Coming from an editing background, I'm always thinking--who would I want to draw this story? Maybe I can try to work some of that in there. But I'm realizing that I have to figure out what my signature is. What is my handwriting style that people are going to equate with me?
I hope that I don't get to a point where my standards are too high, where I'm psyching myself out of producing things because I don't think they'll be "great." These emo mini-comics that I used to hand out to editors while I was at DC, I look at them now and I cringe, and my first reaction is, "Do I want to have thousands of these out there? Sell 'em through Diamond?" and that's horrible. That's the worst kind of self-imposed pressure that you can have, because it keeps you from doing anything worthwhile. It's absolutely antithetical to creating art.
It's all about fear. If you gave me a piece of paper, ten minutes, and a permanent pen--you're going to get a shitty drawing. You give me a pad of paper, a pencil -- you don't even have to give me the eraser, rip it off -- it would be a better drawing because my mind is suddenly relaxed - I can play with it more. It's a purely mental thing. I have the same feeling about writing, I have to be at a place where I can re-work it into something that's going to be okay for me to put out.
I really don't know what's going to happen next. I'm doing an issue of
DMZ that I'm using as a palate cleanser from my
Brave and the Bold stuff, the super-hero covers. I know Brian Wood's aesthetics lie much more in line with how I want to be drawing comics. So I'm using it as license to really let things go. Part of why I'm excited about this upcoming project with Brian Azzarello is that I know I've got an opportunity to do something that has commercial appeal, but isn't bound by the same pressure that you feel when you draw a super-hero book.
To be frank, conversations with Cliff Chiang can, at times, feel like a challenge. You're aware before you sit down with him that he's someone you don't really know, but his amiability and frankness make it seem as if he wants nothing more than to spend time with you, that there's truly nowhere else he'd rather be. He's more than willing to joke along about the silliness of comics featuring super-heroes crying, or to widen his eyes and shake his head when the conversation turns to gossip, but when you stop to look at your notes...you realize you talked more than he did.
And so you go back and look at what his career looks like. How he went against what was expected of him and used his Harvard degree to get a job as an assistant editor, and then sat around lapping up as much information as he could find, and then, when it seemed like the doors were finally beginning to open...he quit. He got a job drawing Superman, and he drew it in a style that, at first, nobody else believed would work. He worked on struggling titles with writers he believed in, found a bit of popular success, and then took himself out of the public eye for two years to draw a graphic novel that came bearing the barest connection to the successes he'd already had. Since his return, he's filled in on a couple of low-selling super-hero books that seem to interest him mostly because of the visual challenges they offered, and his future remains a tad amorphous, a bit unsure. His own descriptions of his past don't seem to track--he rationalizes away the moments where he was successful as if it surprised him, aloofly allowing words like "luck" and "help" to become the explanations for his creative successes.
And so you try to dig deeper. Initially, he was willing to allow his career to be described as scattered and schizoid, and yet when it's pointed out to him that it seems to be following a very definite track--one that started with well-received back-up stories, a mini-series, an ongoing run, a graphic novel and the occasional crowd-pleasing proletarian one-shot--he grudgingly admits to having a plan.
He sidesteps a detailed description--it is, ultimately, his private life. Instead, he recalls time spent in college, when he was studying Milton's Paradise Lost and William's Blake weird paintings of Biblical holocaust. His major thesis project was a lengthy study of Milton's work, pages of illustration that were designed to make an argument for art as a form of literary criticism. Somewhere during the process, his professor off-handedly mentioned the Roto-Virgilia, or "Wheel of Virgil", a career and aesthetic model that attracted a certain breed of poet. Cliff doesn't claim to know the details of it, but the description he recalls--a way of life where an artist is expected to master the vagaries of form, building their skill over years of practice until they're prepared for a final, epic work--is one that immediately clicks into place. The broad career leaps, the obsession with detail, the changing reading habits, the belief that all of his choices have resulted in some kind of useful, positive lesson...
He knows exactly what he's doing. And while he's totally willing to open up about it, he doesn't really see the point in doing so. You've got the comics. What else do you need?
Images from: Beware The Creeper, Brave and the Bold, Detective Comics, Human Target & DMZ.
DMZ cover by John Paul Leon.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
