Last week in an advance review, we took a look at Larime Taylor’s “A Voice in the Dark” and very much liked what we saw. After a successful second Kickstarter to help Larime get off assisted living and finish his book for digital distribution, the book was picked up by Top Cow/Image and solicited for November, immediately catching our eye. As James explained in his review:
In all honesty, even if I did not know the story behind Larime Taylor and how he came to create this book, it would still impress me. “A Voice in the Dark” is not “The Comic By The Guy Who Drew It With His Mouth” it’s “That Really Good Comic by Larime Taylor.” If you are interested in down-to-earth serial killers, dark college radio, or books with far more dedication and work put into them than your average comic, you owe it to yourself to read “A Voice in the Dark.”
As such, in anticipation for the book and excitement after reading it, we talked with Larime about making comics, voices in the dark, how he came to comics and more.
So Larime, why comics?
Because it’s all I can do? Seriously, though, being in a wheelchair and having minimal use of my hands, I can’t flip burgers or build houses for a living. I’ve been barely getting by on $1k a month from SSDI for the last 13 years, and something had to give. Something had to change. We couldn’t keep living in poverty for another decade. My storytelling and my art are all I have as far as marketable skills, so comics was the obvious answer.
What was your first experience in comics?
In my childhood it was spinner racks at the 7-11 my dad managed. I’d buy X-Men, Wolverine, Captain America. I was a Marvel kid. I was never heavily into it, though. I was more into cartoons and RPGs. I probably stopped reading comics by junior high. In college, I picked up The Crow graphic novel, and a friend loaned me a few of The Sandman trades, and I realized that comics could tell serious, mature stories for an older audience. That was when I really started getting into comics.
How did you first get into illustrating comics?
Out of necessity, really. I was originally just going to write, but we couldn’t afford a penciler, and my wife got too sick to color, so things fell apart. I decided that if I wanted to get somewhere, I had to put it all on my shoulders, so I took my experience as a caricature artist and taught myself how to draw more than just faces. I taught myself how to letter and tone, and I started working on a book I’d do myself. That was how this book started, and here I am.
I’m sure you get this question a lot, but can you talk a bit about how you learned to illustrate?
From my mother, as a child. She’s artistic, so my earliest lessons were from her. My pre-school teachers and physical therapists wanted me to write with my hand, but it wasn’t working, so my mom insisted that they let me try with my mouth. I immediately wrote the entire alphabet, and it started there. More formal training began in junior high, which is when I learned how to do caricatures. I was an art major for a year in college before switching to writing and directing for theater because art school had sucked all the fun out of art. Other than doing caricatures at events for a bit of extra cash, I never took art seriously again until about 2008, when my first comic book as a writer fell apart as I mentioned before. That was when I decided to teach myself sequential art.
I also saw that you can do 1-2 pages a day. How did you develop your technique?
I work from photos – all of which are my own – for the basic poses and anatomy. I can’t do what most artists do and model for myself, so I have friends stand in. I get the panels blocked out as photos and do all my layouts with those, then start drawing, turning my friends into the characters and building the world and backgrounds around them. I’ve had five different people stand in for Zoey already in just four issues, and the character remains consistent, which I think makes the case that I’m not just tracing photos. There’s a stigma among some circles of fandom around photo referencing, that it’s just copying and tracing, but it’s really not, and a vast majority of comic artists use it to various degrees. Fiona Staples works much like I do, starting with photos of herself in the poses she needs, and going straight to digital inks. Drawing digitally basically removes the need for pencils as inks are easily erased now. You’re not wasting time drawing the same thing twice. By starting with the inks, I save a ton of time, which is how I work so fast. I do everything digitally, with a Wacom Cintiq tablet screen, holding the stylus in my mouth.
Continued belowReading the first issue, “A Voice in the Dark” reminds me of a more subtle version of Dexter. Where did the original idea for the book come about?
It was originally going to be a parody of the slasher horror genre I grew up on in the 80’s. I started out by taking tropes and inverting them – the black girl dies first, so in my story, she’s the sole survivor, things like that. Then I toyed with the idea of her surviving because she was the killer. It all grew out of that. Over time, I realized that I had an interesting concept and characters, and decided to start taking it more seriously, and so what began as a spoof is now a far more serious and realistic story. I kept some of the camp for flavor – things like the town being called Cutter’s Circle and having an abundance of serial killers, or the students nicknaming the college Slaughter U, and the campus radio station being K.I.L.L..
The book itself was rather intimate and insightful in its relationship with the characters. What do you do to get into the world of these characters?
I think it comes from my playwriting background. In theater, unlike film or TV, you can’t entertain with visual spectacle nearly as much, and so it’s really all about the writing. Character and dialogue in particular. You’re very limited in what you can do on a live stage, so the way you draw in the audience is with the acting, and actors need good writing to pull that off. As a playwright, I had to give each character a unique voice, a compelling personality, and I had to convey everything about the story through the characters. Now that I’m working in comics, I’m still writing what is essentially a character study, because while I could have aliens and space ships and explosions and all that spectacle, as an artist I’m still fairly limited. I draw people, and that’s about it. Until I can pull off the big stuff as an artist, or write for someone else, my stories are going to be a lot of people talking, psychology over action. I have a very specific tool set.
What is it about Zoey’s darker thoughts that you think it is we as a culture find fascinating?
I think it’s because we all have impulses and urges to do things we know we shouldn’t or aren’t supposed to. Nobody talks about it, but we have daydreams about strangling our boss, or sleeping with our best friend, or stealing something we want but can’t afford. Imagination is our safety valve. We daydream and fantasize so we can live sane, legal lives. Everybody has a taboo desire of some kind, and we usually think it makes us a freak, but the dirty little secret is we all do. Violent TV shows and heavy metal music don’t turn us into murderers. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t make us kill. We enjoy those things becauae they let us safely vent the things that would get us in trouble if we actually acted on them. It’s fun, cathartic.
What sort of comics influenced you in the creation of your own?
Things like The Crow and The Sandman, as I mentioned earlier. People like the Hernandez Brothers, Terry Moore, Warren Ellis. Books like Saga, The Walking Dead, Think Tank.
You had a number of talented folks contribute to your Kickstarter, like Terry Moor and Amanda Conner. How did their collaboration with you come about?
I asked them. I met most of them at Wonder Con, when I was pitching the series that my first Kickstarter funded the pilot for, and asked if they’d consider contributing to a second Kickstarter to help me keep working on the series as I tried to get it picked up. Most of the people I approached said yes.
How did you find the experience of Kickstarter in helping you to make comics? Was it successful in giving you autonomy?
Very. I was able to create the book and get it going on my terms, and that put me in a good position with publishers. I was able to give them a 3-issue mini as my pitch instead of 5 pages and a concept. They could hold the printed trade in their hands and see how serious and professional I was.
Continued belowHow did you get hooked up with Image/Top Cow for the release of the comic?
That first Kickstarter, which funded the production of the first 3-issue arc. It gave me the ultimate submission package – a finished product.
You’d already had a bit of the book done by the time it went to Kickstarter and had planned for 8 issues. Are you looking to expand upon that at all now that you’ve teamed up with a publisher?
Well, the first Kickstarter paid for creation of Blood Makes Noise, the first storyarc, which is being released by Top Cow as issues #1 and #2. The first issue is a deluxe issue combining the first two parts of the 3-part mini, at 36 pages of story, and the second issue concludes the plot introduced in the first. The second Kickstarter funded what will be issues #3-#7 from Top Cow, the next storyarc called Killing Game, which I’m working on now. Thoae backers from the second Kickstarter are getting PDFs of those issues months before they hit the shelves. Killing Game pt. 1, issue #3, will be in stores in January of 2014, but backers will get to read it by the end of October 2013 In fact, they’ll have read all the way through #7 by the time #3 comes out in stores.
The original Kickstarter was just for a digital series. Are you excited that this book is going to come to print?
Technically the first Kickstarter was for a printed trade, and the second was digital-only, but yeah, there’s a huge difference between a trade you self-published and seeing a comic with your work in it bearing the iconic Image ‘i’ on the cover. Knowing that your hard work has paid off in the form of an ongoing monthly series from Top Cow, and that initial orders have been more than double what the publisher was hoping for, that’s very exciting. The book got picked up, early numbers suggest it’ll be a hit, and I might get to do this for quite some time. That’s more than I could have hoped for, and exactly the kind of change my life needed when I set out to do this.
