Artist August: Charles Paul Wilson III (Interview)

Today on Artist August, we have an interview with an artist who we at MC think is one of the most underrated names in the industry: Charles Paul Wilson III. For those that don’t recognize that name, he works on a great book from Th3rd World Studios named The Stuff of Legend. This book is one of our favorites, and with its third volume starting last week, we’re hoping more and more people are getting on board with this underrated hit.

Thanks to Charles for talking with us, as we look at how he got the Stuff of Legend job, what it was like going to the Kubert School of Art, what it’s like being a member of Ten Ton Studios, and a whole lot more. Check it out after the jump, and don’t forget to pick up the first issue of the third volume of The Stuff of Legend, titled A Jester’s Tale, this Wednesday.

Is there a single moment in your life you can look back on as the moment you knew you wanted to work in comics? Or was it more of a natural progression that led you here?

Charles Paul Wilson III: More of a natural progression. I’ve always loved reading comics. When I was a kid I wasn’t thinking about artists, writers or editors or anyone responsible for making the comics, I just liked reading ’em. I liked to draw quite a bit, and eventually I did try to put together my own comics with notebook and typing paper, but I wasn’t super serious about making anything of it, I was just having fun.

I worked in the concrete business for a while for Karn’s, Inc. and attended classes at IUPUI in Indiana until an opportunity to go to a comic book illustration school came up and I took it.

You went to the Kubert School of Art, arguably the most renowned comic book art school around (and something every comic fan wants to get into when they are younger). What was that experience like, and who were some of your instructors?

CPW3: When I was a kid I really wanted to go, especially after first hearing about it. I liked to draw and I liked comics. It sounded like it would be an amusement park experience.

When I finally did get to go I was in my mid-twenties and the school was very real and serious. The workload was extremely heavy and there were times I really hated drawing because of how hard it got and how bad a lot of my drawings came out. Constantly erasing and redrawing until, after so much of that, the fun started to come back when I had a lot more control over my drawing. Fortunately I also had a lot of direction from the staff of instructors there and my classmates were extremely helpful too. There was always someone to discuss projects with and lots of ideas flying around.

The book I’m currently working on, Stuff of Legend, is filled with stuff I learned at the school. Off the top of my head, the first panel of the double-page spread in Volume II where we meet the king cobra for the first time is an evolved variation of a layout approach Andy Kubert taught us during our second year. All of my sequential storytelling is grounded in stuff we learned in our first year sequential class with Fernando Ruiz. Whenever I rule a page with a T-square and triangle I think of Mike Chen’s classes. Doug Axeman, Darren Auck, Mike Kraiger and Alec Stevens, as well as Toby Cypress and Joel Naprstek (and Sergio Cariello!), were some of the other instructors who had a huge impact on how my work would shape up. I use all kinds of stuff I learned at the school everyday, and it wasn’t just the instructors who were influential. Some of my classmates – HÃ¥vard Johansen, T.J. Kirsch, Adam Walmsley and a bunch of other guys and girls – played a big role in what I do with and think of sequential artwork.

You’re getting more and more recognition all of the time for your work on The Stuff of Legend, a book that has a small but very passionate audience. How did that project come together, and how has it been working on that book?

CPW3: From what I understand, Mike Raicht and Brian Smith were working up the initial concept back around the time they were editors over at Marvel Comics. They shopped it around for a while and, years later, brought it to Mike Devito and Jon Conkling over at Th3rd World Studios.

I had met Mike Devito through his brother, Tony, who was in my class at The Kubert School, and we had kept in touch since graduation. Devito remembered I had tonal drawings in my portfolio and thought that style might fit with Raicht and Smitty’s Stuff of Legend project and asked me to work up some sketches as a try out, and here we are!

I don’t have much in the way of projects under my belt, but I can honestly say, art wise, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I really enjoy working on this book and everyone I work with on it is really cool. I think Raicht and Smitty have crafted a really nice story and Devito and Conkling make my artwork look really nice and do a fantastic job with design and putting the books together.

When you were developing the look of The Stuff of Legend, what did you look to for inspiration? Have you ever checked out Dean Koontz and Phil Park’s Oddkins?

CPW3: Once our first issue came out a lot of people directed me to that book and others that were similar in theme to ours, but I haven’t checked them out yet. I don’t think I looked at any other stories for inspiration or research, but I did scour the Internet for reference on antique toys, what they were made of back in the ’40s (when the story takes place) and if I couldn’t find reference on any toys I was looking for I made them up based on materials toys were made of back then, like Jester or Princess, for example. Max in teddy form is based loosely from what I remember of my old teddy bear from when I was a kid. Smitty came up with Harmony’s initial design. Devito and I based Percy’s blue color on what he remembered of his or his brother’s old piggy bank.

As far as the look of the book itself, Th3rd World was shooting for an old storybook presentation. Square format, stressed and antiqued backgrounds and monochromatic sepia tones are used for that effect.

The cast of The Stuff of Legend

I think one thing that I thought would be difficult visually on this book that you absolutely nail is the conveyance of emotions in these toys using mannerisms and gestures. How difficult was it for you to conceptualize things of that sort? Was that a difficult process?

CPW3: There was an instructor at the Kubert School for our Caricature/Cartooning class that had us visualize our figures as silhouettes so we can focus on the overall gestures, and I remember thinking a lot of my figures looked like boring clumps that said nothing about what they were doing. So, stripping the detail from my figures helped me understand how to be a little more expressive with what I was able to show, and while I used it as best I could in everything I did I had no idea it would be so useful when it came to drawing toys whose faces were expressionless.

Also, John Ostrander was our Story Adaptation instructor in my second year at the Kubert School and he had us read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. In that book there’s a chapter that breaks down and analyzes different things you can do by combining words and pictures, and that’s where I found interdependent storytelling – words and/or pictures that don’t do much for the reader by themselves story wise, but say and do something when put together. This put a lot of stuff together in my head when it came to comics, mostly because up to that point, while I was learning to draw comics, I had really only seen comics from a kind of strictly visual point of view, and I really started thinking about the “words” and what they brought to the experience.

Anyway, back to the point, one of the main reasons I feel the toys work in the book is because of the writing paired with the imagery, each heavily reliant on the other to make the story what it is.

Would have been really difficult on my part without captions and word balloons!

The Stuff of Legend is, without a doubt, a massive critical success. Everyone who reads it loves it. Is it daunting for you as a creator to try and consistently live up to that praise?

CPW3: We’ve been incredibly fortunate the book’s been getting so much positive feedback. Everyone has been working so hard on what’s coming next for the book that I’m not entirely sure we’ve had much time to look back and let the reader response affect us in the creative sense, but now that you mention it, I’ve met fans at shows and conventions and they were so nice and everything that I think that helps me want to strive to do better with each book.

You’re a member of Ten Ton Studios. What does being a member of that online collective of artists do for you as an artist, and how did you get involved?

CPW3: My friend and old schoolmate HÃ¥vard Johansen had been doing the weekly sketch challenge on the site and goaded me into playing one week and I kinda got hooked. After a while I kinda got to know everybody, and it’s been really neat to watch a lot of the artists there work to improve over the years, participate in critiques, get their first gigs and continue to grow. There are quite a few members who are popular names in comics these days: Khoi Pham, Reilly Brown, Chris Burnham, Jeremy Freeman, Nick Pitarra and a bunch of other guys. The site is an excellent place to discuss comic art which is extremely satisfying for those of us who can’t get their fix discussing the topic at the dinner table with family or in line at the coffee shop. And, back to HÃ¥vard – HÃ¥vard did the creature design work for the movie Troll Hunter! Go see it!

Does feedback (both positive and negative) with fans and critics via social media push you as an artist? How does that aspect affect your art?

CPW3: Absolutely! There are a lot of things that motivate me to do new, more interesting things with my work and reader/reviewer reaction is one of them. And given how easy it is for people online to show dislike for something it does feel good to read nice things about my work and the work we do on the book and it does help motivate me to go that extra mile.

In the digital age, new tools are available to artists of all types. How does that affect and expand your work?

CPW3: I’m still working with pencil and paper and I love filling up portfolios with artwork, but I’m slowly starting to see everyone’s inevitable move to digital while the tree populations steadily expand, rise up and make slaves of the human race. And it’s gonna get ugly.

But seriously, at the moment, unless you’re creating a piece with no intention for print or the like, I think the bare minimum for an artist these days is a familiarity with photoshop and growth from there.

Your art on Stuff of Legend has been the main body of your work so far. What would be a dream project to move on to eventually for you?

CPW3: Dream project? As far as popular existing stuff, I’d like to resurrect Droids at Dark Horse, or work on a Bat title or Spider-man book as far as that stuff goes. But I also have my own projects I’d like to do as well. Working with Raicht, Smitty and Th3rd World on Stuff of Legend has really given me the confidence in my own ideas and the want and need to make comics from those ideas.

Desert Island question: one book, one album, one film and one comic. What do you take with you?

CPW3: For a book I’d bring Stephen King’s The Stand with me. It’s a big, fat book and I like it. Plus the copy I’d have would be the one I got from my brother, so one of the read-throughs would be to wonder what he thought of the book while reading it.

For an album, assuming compilations and greatest hits don’t count, I’m going to go with David Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World. I had and old, beat up vinyl copy once and really loved it from beginning to end, but for the island situation I’d want the Ryko release with the bonus tracks.

One film – Hot Fuzz. I love that movie, and I’d be totally into memorizing all the lines from it. Even better if it was my copy of the DVD with multiple commentary tracks.

And one comic – damn, I can’t help but think I need an OGN or collected trade for volume’s sake. The Dark Knight Returns. Everything about that book is cool, and I could see myself tearing through it a number of more times.

Who are your favorite artists working in comics today?

CPW3: Favorites, eh? I really like Kevin Nowlan’s work. I try to get my hands on anything he does, and I’m almost always guaranteed a fun time when I read a story he works on. I also really like Skottie Young’s Oz stuff, Gabriel Rodriguez on Locke and Key, Thomas Boatwright and his Zeke Deadwood comic, T.J. Kirsch on She Died in Terre Bonne and Nick Pitarra’s Red Wing book.

What projects do you have coming up?

CPW3: More Stuff of Legend! This summer we’re releasing our four-issue Volume III: A Jester’s Tale monthly with a trade release around Christmas! Smitty’s book, The Intrepid Escapegoat is hitting stands this summer too, and Mike Raicht’s The Pack will be out soon as well!