To round out this week in Artist August, we’ve got a chat for you with the artist of “the Stuff of Legend,” Charles Paul Wilson III! In which we chat about “the Stuff of Legend,” ninja turtles and samurais, Winnie the Pooh and mice and, of course, cheeseburgers.
Since we chatted last year, what has changed for you in terms of your artistic process? Have you begun experimenting in the digital realm at all?
Charles Paul Wilson III: Last year I was working primarily with pencil renderings and some painting, mostly on The Stuff of Legend, but this year has seen a lot of ink and wash work and experimenting and illustrating in different styles. Still exploring style quite a bit, I imagine I’ll always be doing so, but it seems like there’s something new and fun to discover in my drawing if I’m open to trying something different, and for the most part the different styles I’ve worked with this past year have been finding their way into my more established drawing habits. Still have some work to do on my basic drawing. But most of my work is still with traditional pencil and paper. I work with my stuff in photoshop quite often, but I haven’t started drawing digitally yet. If I get a chance at some point I’d like to check out the digital coloring class at Comics Experience. Some friends of mine have taken the course and said it was really good. But yeah, I still work mostly with pencil and paper.
Another big thing to happen since then and now is that Stuff of Legend has been optioned for a film! How exciting is it to see this title get such recognition?
CPWIII: I think it’s pretty cool! Well, as cool as it can get with wherever it’s at – I’m not sure where Th3rd World, Mandeville and Disney are with talks as far as that stuff goes, I’m the furthest from knowing anything about it, I think. I’ve gotten to see some of the production work the director and his production company have put together and it looks really, really cool, and I’m very excited and based on the stuff I’ve seen of Pete Candeland’s, the guy set to direct, we’re in for something very imaginative and fun!
Do you have any involvement in the artistic direction of the film?
CPWIII: Beyond what I’ve designed for our books, not really, no, I’m not in control of that stuff and for all I know, with whoever’s putting it together creatively I’d probably be more in the way than not. But I bet it would be cool and fun if I was ever asked.
Generally speaking, the comic medium is capable of things that other mediums ostensibly aren’t. Is there anything that you think works particularly well in the book that wouldn’t work well in an adaptation?
CPWIII: As far as movie adaptations go, I imagine the enemy would be length. I think that’s the enemy of anything that could be adapted, really, unless maybe you’re working from something short, which might still be the case I guess. But we have a lot of space to tell our story in our books, and a lot of room for many more characters and the roles they could play, and the world building aspect probably wouldn’t need to feel as immediate or condensed, maybe. But I’m not familiar with making movies or anything, so I guess I can really only speculate as a movie goer.
The last volume to the Stuff of Legend, “A Jester’s Tale,” featured a second Jester thrown into the mix, a polar opposite to the character we were familiar with. Was this something you had planned for originally when designing the Jester character in the first two volumes?
CPWIII: Not initially, but the character was created while we were working on Volume I. Jester’s story was conceived around that time too and at some point discussed to be an off-shoot of the main story. There were lots of ideas flying every which way back then that are popping up here and there throughout the series now. One of my favorite ideas, which happened to be one of mine (although a very, very boring one) was about a second team of toys who ventured into The Dark after the toys’ first meeting. They got to the beach, changed their minds and went home. I think there was a good joke with the baseball and his disappointment with his transformation (or lack thereof, he was still just a baseball!).
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The overall setting of the book featured a much wider scope than usual, and once again we get a bevy of “in real life” versions of toys. What is your general process when setting up the world and turning plastic and wood figurines into real boys and girls? How do you decide which elements of any given figure to bring into more vivid detail?
CPWIII: Something established during A Jester’s Tale was there are toys living in The Dark who have never belonged to the boy. They’re from the same house but from an earlier time, so there are a variety of toys I can design based off of materials used anytime before 1944. I can kinda base them off real toys that existed back then or make them up from scratch. A lot of times Mike and Brian, the writers, have specific types of toys in mind for the story. Sometimes the design or look of a toy could be influenced by the company that toy keeps in The Dark, or maybe the role they play or the job they have. Or sometimes there’s a design for a toy that’s the complete opposite of what would typically be expected from who they are and what they do. Or there are little things readers may or may not have noticed, like damaged eyes on certain characters. There is usually one character in each group of toys that has a damaged eye. Sometimes it has to do directly with the story and sometimes we meet the characters that way, some of whom have more prominent roles in the story and others who are in and out in two panels.
The book doesn’t lack for action sequences or anything, but “A Jester’s Tale” seemed jam packed with great high-paced scenes — from the opening ship battle to the train-centered finale, both of which seem like they belong in blockbuster films as much as a comic. In terms of choreography, how do you put together these grandiose pieces?
All the swashbuckling and dueling and blowing stuff up was a lot of fun. It hadn’t really been done in the previous volumes, and I think Brian and Mike gave all those action sequences very interesting parts to play in the ongoing story.
Brian paced a lot of stuff out in the script, like the ship battle and the duel with Rebecca, and some of them, like the battle at the end, I think you can tell I tried to get the two jesters to hit as many characters as possible before the dust settled with those two and we walked into Volume IV.
CPWIII: The volume also ended with a bit of an Empire Strikes Back down-note, as for all intents and purposes our heroes have “lost” for the time being — and it’s not the first time either! How do you feel as the artist of the book who has to bring these darker moments to life? Do you find yourself verklempt at all?
Absolutely. I dig down and try to find a way to empathize with each character’s experience as I draw them and whatever’s happening to them. If something tragic is happening with a character I sometimes feel for them when I come across it in script or it’s told to me over the phone, but I think I really feel it when I see the drawings working themselves out. And I think if it can kinda have the intended effect on me then there’s a good chance the reader will feel it too.
So what can you tell us about the fourth volume of Stuff of Legend?
CPWIII: In Volume IV we’re going to find out what the Boogeyman’s been up to in other areas of The Dark as well as see what he’s had going on behind the scenes since Volume II and the horrible things he plans on doing with the whistle he recovered from The Laughing Ghost in Volume III. We also catch back up with Max, Scout and Monty as they set out to find a way to stop the Boogeyman and recover the boy. We’re going to see what else has managed to make a home in The Dark, something I don’t think we’d necessarily expect to see there, and meet a host of new characters as well as see some familiar faces. And we’re going to see the horrors all our characters face or take part in. I think this next volume has taken on more of a tone of horror than the rest.
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Another exciting project we’ve seen from you is a Splinter-centric issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ micro-series/one-shots. How did this project come about, and how was it to step away from the SOL world for a while?
CPWIII: It was nice to step away from Stuff for a moment (although I think I still worked on it a little) and I was very happy to be asked to work on Ninja Turtles. And I got to meet some new people who were nice and cool to work with. The editor, Bobby Curnow, has worked with one of the writers for Stuff of Legend, Mike Raicht, on Godzilla for IDW, and I think Mike put us in touch with each other, and we’re still working together on stuff and it’s been really fun to be included!
The characters of the Turtle-world aren’t too far apart from that of Stuff of Legend overall, but was there anything in particular that differed greatly for you when illustrating that title?
CPWIII: I was fortunate enough to illustrate some of the interior pages in straight black and white (pen and ink), something I hadn’t done for a long time given the amount of tonal pencil work on Stuff of Legend, and I was really happy doing it. It was really fun. And I was happy with the drawings and I hope to do more non-tonal sequential pages that way.
The issue took place almost entirely in Feudal Japan, which features a rather popular aesthetic. Did you use anything in particular for inspiration for the setting and characters?
CPWIII: I think the first thing I did was watch Ninja Scroll. Probably for inspiration, I don’t think I used it for reference, but I did have it on several times while I worked. And reference was a little tougher for some of the feudal Japan stuff than I thought it would be given everything you can look up on Google. A friend gave me a list of movies to check out for reference, so I drove to the store and picked up The Last Samurai and Yojimbo and those were tremendously helpful. And a Samurai Castle book from Amazon, which was also helpful in finding names of things I could also look up on Google. “Feudal japan sharp thingy on wall” wasn’t cutting it!
Outside of Stuff of Legend and the Turtles, you’ve done several EH Shepard-esque commissions, from a Marvel Variant to a piece for Nick Pitarra involving the cast of the Manhattan Projects. How did you begin working in this style, and what is it about Milne’s work that you particularly enjoy drawing from?
CPWIII: Marvel asked if I’d be interested in doing a variant cover for their Avengers Appreciation month. They wanted to show The Avengers as toys as they might be illustrated by E.H. Shepard, who was the illustrator for Winnie the Pooh in the late twenties, and the theme of the variants they were doing were to show The Avengers as they might have been illustrated by different artists throughout history.
I had a Winnie the Pooh book lying around with my other books and purchased a book called The Work of E.H. Shepard to practice out of, but it took some time to find a connection and a cover idea most people would identify. I eventually found a character style that seemed to work with the rendering style, and when the cover was finished I worried people wouldn’t know what they were looking at. But the cover seemed to work with people and there was a positive response. And I think one of the best experiences I had being a part of that Appreciation Month was seeing all the cool covers the other artists had come up with when they were solicited.
The inking and drawing style has kinda been evolving and taking on a life of its own since then, and the scratchy, classic literary-illustrative quality has been finding its way into my other works, including areas of Stuff of Legend. And it’s a lot of fun.
So, I kind of have to ask: what’s up with all the cheeseburgers!
Continued belowCPWIII: Well, I’m glad someone finally asked! And please keep in mind this is totally true. Nick Pitarra, Joe Eisma, Ryan Browne and I were at Heroes Con in North Carolina this year and after the show one day we were talking about where to eat. We were really, really hungry, you see, and hadn’t eaten at all during the show.
Well anyway, we heard about this really great noodle restaurant, I don’t remember the name, and decided to go. But thanks to some confusing directions from someone (who we found out later thought we were driving) we got lost along the way, it was much further than we thought and after an hour and a half of walking in and out of various restaurants we found it. It was just a really long walk, I guess.
So we went in, were seated and given menus and wound up spending what would turn out to be too much time looking at all the menu stuff because some loud yelling started coming from the kitchen and we could hear a struggle and then two big crack noises and the room shook for a moment and some powdery stuff from the ceiling came down on us. Not a lot or anything. Dust or whatever.
So the maitre d’ guy rushed back to the kitchen and then another guy came out after a couple minutes, asked if we were ready to order but told us the only things on the menu were cheeseburgers.
And we were like, cheeseburgers? In a noodle restaurant? And the guy said yeah, but the meat was being chopped up and would take just a minute longer and they were trying to locate some hamburger buns and ketchup and cheese. But yeah, our burgers could be out in a jiff.
Nick, Joe and Ryan were ready to go and someone whispered we should call the cops, but I reminded them of the long walk back and what it took to get to this place and everyone looked tired and hungry. So we all ordered the cheeseburger.
And so our burgers were served fifteen minutes later and we were excited, except they were served on wheat buns so I couldn’t eat mine and so I waited to see if they had fries. But everyone else was munching on theirs and Nick mentioned how it was overcooked but chewy and then he pulled a piece of metal out of his mouth. And it was a nipple ring. Or Joe said so. He said that’s a nipple ring, and Ryan asked if it was a guy nipple ring or a girl nipple ring, and Joe told him it’s 2012 and it really shouldn’t matter, and then Nick spit out the nipple. Ryan took another bite of his and spit it out and when he set his burger down a giant, wet, green worm crawled out from under the bun, saw that its tail had been bitten off, turned to Ryan and said,”
Nah, I’m just kidding.
What really happened was Joe once asked me if I liked cheeseburgers and I said yeah. And of course it’s been crazy ever since.
We asked this last year, but it bears repeating a year later: who are your favorite artists working in comics today?
Man, I think these days if I read a comic and love it then the person who drew it is my favorite artist. And/or inker and colorist. But there are comics I’ve been following somewhat religiously and the people drawing them, like Gabriel Rodriguez who draws Locke & Key, Chris Burnham drawing Batman Inc., Zach Howard on The Cape and now Wild Blue Yonder, Ryan Stegman started inking his own stuff recently and it’s worth seeing in his Fantastic Four books that are coming out, Skottie Young’s Oz stuff, Bernie Wrightson on the new Frankenstein title, David Petersen’s Mouse Guard. I even backtracked to try and read all the Dustin Nguyen/Paul Dini Detective Comics and Streets of Gotham books that came out a few years ago. And of course some of my friends are doing murderously great stuff on their books like Nick Pitarra on Manhattan Projects, Joe Eisma on Morning Glories, Reilly Brown’s Power Play and Tommy Patterson on Game of Thrones. Riley Rossmo has a book coming out I’m looking forward to called Bedlam. I picked up the first Nite Owl issue that Andy and Joe Kubert did and that was really beautiful and I’d like to see the rest. And there’s an anthology called Epics with Fernando Ruiz, Fabio Redivo, Bob Harden and Anthony Marques that I’m really looking forward to.
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What should the world expect from Charles Paul Wilson III over the next year? Including more Stuff of Legend, of course.
CPWIII: Including a lot more Stuff of Legend, I’m working on a short story for the next Mouse Guard anthology, Legends of the Guard II, and I’m really excited and almost finished with it. I’m also doing a series of variant covers for a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle book called Secret History of the Foot clan with colors by Ryan Browne who works on a web comic I really like called God Hates Astronauts. And more covers for The Red Ten from Comixtribe, a cover for The Perhapanauts and a retailer exclusive cover for the new Doctor Who #1 that can be found a ultimatecomics.com
