Multiversity Comics Presents: Brandon Graham

Today at Multiversity, we talk with writer/artist Brandon Graham. He’s likely known by most of you as the creator of the Image Comics (by way of Tokyopop) series King City, which is being collected for the first time on February 22, but if people don’t start picking up on his greatness because of his work on the Extreme Studios relaunch title Prophet, it will be an absolute crime (check my advance review of his first issue here).

Brandon’s a huge talent, and you can find out about the journey of getting King City released in collected form, how he landed the Prophet gig, who is favorite creators are, and a whole lot more after the jump. Thanks to Brandon for chatting with me, and make sure to pre-order Prophet #21 and the King City collection at your local comic book store.

The Cover to the King City collection

The collected edition of King City is coming out Feb. 22, 2012, but the series in issue form has been wrapped for nearly a year at this point. Has that strictly been tied to sorting out rights between Image and Tokyopop, or is there something else to that?

Pulling the Image issues off was a serious feat. Eric Stephenson, the head dude at Image, spent about 9 months hammering out that first deal with Tokyopop.

I hadn’t expected to see anything past it just being issues but Eric kept at it. It’s shown me a lot about Image’s motivation as a publisher…that they would put so much effort into something that they certainly don’t need commercially and that they don’t even have any stake in past publishing.

Eric’s a pretty rad guy, and it’s great to hear that he was making the extra effort like that. Just because we’re curious, how and why did the original transition from Tokyopop to Image happen? I’ve never actually heard the story behind that.

When Tokyopop told me they weren’t going to be printing the second book I frantically emailed everyone in comics I knew for advice. I’d become pals with Joe Keatinge, (who) was working as Image’s marketing guy. When I wrote Joe I expected just some friendly advice but he went out of his way to put me in touch with Stephenson and put in a good word about my work.

I sometimes complain about the role that nepotism plays in the comics industry but the other side of that coin is that I wouldn’t be able to get away with this fantastic scam of drawing comics all day if not for the good friends I’ve got. I was just telling someone that it’s not about how you get somewhere as much as what you do once you’re there. Although I do still wish that there was more and better inroads for new artists into comics.

When I was starting out Antarctic Press and Radio Comix had some anthologies they would throw new guys in and then transition them to full books of their own. I think Image had a great start with their Pop Gun anthology but I just wish more of those people went on to do full books.

It seems that there isn’t really surefire way to make it into the industry, short of putting out self-published/creator-owned books and hoping that they get your name out enough to get yourself more widely known. Why do you think that is? Do you think with things like Deviant Art and social media it’s easier today for an artist to strike out on his/her own?

Yeah, I think DA and everything else the Internet has to offer make things much better in just getting your work read. And there’s book publishers as well or even just print to order stuff or even the Xeric Grant.

But as far as most comics in comic stores, I’m not entirely sure the reason for it. I assume that publishers are okay with their own ways of finding creators.

I just find it frustrating when for the most part I can find comics I’m more excited to read outside of comic stores.

Before we get more into King City, I’m curious about what you last mentioned: what comics are you reading? Who are you looking at as creators who really stand out in and out of comic shops?

Oh man, there’s a ton. Here’s the short list.

Tom Herpich
D-pi
Liz Suburbia
John Kantz
Emily Carroll
Lin Visil
Jhosephine Tanuwidjaya
Nick Edwards
Angie Wang
Coleman

The comics out of the shops I’m reading, I really like Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, Adam Warren’s Empowered. Sixth Gun is good. Ken Dahl’s Monsters, Craig Thompson’s Habibi, Patrick Mcewen’s Hair shirt.

I like what Deforge has been doing. I like Kazimir Strzepek’s Mourning Star, Ross Cambell’s Wet Moon.

Also, Fil Barlow and Frank Terran.

And the stuff my close pals do like (James) Stokoe’s Orc Stain and Marley’s work, and my lady, Marian Churchland’s stuff.

And obviously the guys working with me on Prophet, Farel Darymple, Simon Roy and Giannis Milonogiannis are all guys whose personal work I’ve admired for many moons.

But yeah, there’s so many amazing creators whose work is killing me right now.

Graham’s cover to Prophet #21

Speaking of Prophet, I read the first issue and I was blown away by it. It was one of the most unique and engrossing reads I’ve picked up all year, and I especially enjoyed the depth that you took us into the character and the world he’s in. One scene in particular stood out – the one where Prophet is taking inventory – as an example of that depth that adds a ton of realism to this very sci-fi world. I’ve read elsewhere that you like looking into things of that sort, in particular things writers avoid in fiction like eating lunch or going to the bathroom. For you, what is it that makes things like that important in a story? Why do you think the majority of other storytellers skip beats like that?

Thanks.

There’s a couple places in that issues where Simon told me he was playing at doing comics in my style, like the cutaway maps and making one of Prophet’s weapons into a sidekick creature. That scene might have been his idea.

But yeah, I think that type of thing is really important because of how it grounds characters. So you get less soulless automatons and more someone a reader can relate to who can enjoy a sandwich and has stuff in their pockets.

It’s something I enjoy in work I read. I read some of an old Ian Fleming James Bond book recently and I was surprised at how often he had Bond eating toast. In the past I’d always regarded Bond as a cold Martini sipping suit but I warmed up to his character so much more seeing his love of hot buttered toast.

Maybe I put a lot of focus on it but I think a fair amount of people telling stories do it in some form. At least in the stuff I’m interested in reading.

How did you manage to get the Prophet gig? Eric Stephenson had mentioned you talked with him about it at last year’s Emerald City ComiCon, but can you elaborate on that?

It was a really casual talk between me, Joe Keatinge (who is working on Glory) and Stephenson in the back of a pinball bar. I think we were talking about how Prophet could be done like a sci-fi Conan.

Something I’ve really come to appreciate in how Stephenson works as a publisher is how he seems to back creators rather than pitches. I’ve always been bad at impressing editors with pitch ideas.

Years ago I tried to slide a stack of my books across a table at a Vertigo editor like “this is what I do” and got the dead eye back. Both my Multiple warheads and King city got turned down by
everywhere I showed them to until I showed a stack of finished pages.

So Image’s faith in me is the faith I pay them back. After talking to Stephenson, Joe and I also talked to Erik Larsen, who was really into the idea of Prophet being done like Kirby’s Kamandi.

I really liked his enthusiasm about it. I feel like Kamandi must have hit Larsen at that right teenage years that the early Image stuff hit a lot of its reader in. I really want to key into the stuff that I’d read that gave me that kind of feeling about comics.

On your site, you say that in the first run of issues on Prophet, you’ll be working with some really talented artists, namely Roy, Farel Dalrymple, Giannis Milogiannis and yourself on one of them. Did you put together the artists you’re working with yourself? How has it been working with them? I think all of them are incredible, if not a little bit lesser known than they should be. Hopefully this gets them some serious recognition.

Yeah, I got to pick everyone. I’ve been friends with Farel for like 12 years now since we both lived in NYC and I met Simon more recently when Ed Brisson (who is lettering Prophet) published his first book Jan’s Atomic Heart. I met Giannis through Simon. They were kind of comic book pen pals since Giannis lives in Greece.

It’s been fantastic working with everyone on this, what’s been really important to me is that everyone involved can write even Ed in lettering has collaborated with Simon in the past as a writer so I can trusts that he knows where to place things to make them read right.

The main thing is that it gets approached as not my scripts being worked off of but as collaborative storytelling. Simon is really good at calling out what he thinks isn’t working and he’s staying involved with me and Giannis in plotting out the issues Giannis is drawing.

I feel like in approaching a more mainstream thing we had to rethink a little of how it’s done because I’m not really a fan of how monthly comics come out for the most part.

I was so thrilled that Simon dug up his pal Richard BallerMann to color it. I feel like he’s able to not only compete on that mainstream level but also make something that doesn’t look like the other books on the shelves.

I have so much faith in the ability of the guys I’m working with. I like the idea of trying to out Conan the modern run of Conan and hopefully take it somewhere new as well.

I think one thing that rings really true about what you said about Prophet was how you wanted to rethink how this once more mainstream title from Rob Liefeld and Stephen Platt was done. You kept a lot of the core ideas of the original series but changed the feel and storytelling dramatically. I’m curious – have you gotten feedback from Rob as to what he thought of your first issue?

Yeah, Liefeld sent me a nice email after reading the first issue. The whole thing is really surreal, when the original stuff was coming out I was reading almost nothing but black and white comics. I’ve had to relearn what Image means to me as a company.

Because here I am working on Liefeld’s characters and being given the freedom to do it in a way that I’m really proud of and that I think is actually pushing me to grow creatively. Fucking Bizarro Earth. “me am hate image”

Yeah, I think that was one of the interesting things about you working on this book for me was the idea of pairing you with this more traditional comic idea. I mean, Prophet previously was a lot more standard comic storytelling, and I know through reading on Twitter and elsewhere that your sensibilities are not really in tune with the old standards. The only thing I’ve ever read from you associated with the Big Two was a Madame Xanadu story you did with Matt Wagner in a House of Mystery Halloween Annual, and that wasn’t exactly typical fare either as well as a Vertigo book.

How did you go about marrying your comic book ideals with the idea of this time traveling warrior? It sounds like a lot of people helped with the genesis of this blend, like your artistic collaborators and people like Stephenson, Keatinge and Larsen.

I feel like the old Image stuff was jumping away from a lot of standard storytelling and if anything with how guys like Farel and Simon layout a page I think it kind of bringing it back to a more of a 70’s style.

I know stuff like my King City has a lot of weird ideas thrown around but I think in a lot of ways Prophet is me reigning in and reinforcing how I already write. I’m still doing science fiction just kind of changing the tone. Obviously with the help of Simon, Farel and Giannis.

The exciting thing for me that Stephenson, Larsen and Keatinge have done for Prophet was just giving me the freedom to do something I thought was cool.

Like that Xanadu story I did, it was a work for hire job and it paid nicely and I had fun drawing it but I wasn’t really in a position to do work I was proud of.

There was a writer who I never spoke to and an editor who had very specific ideas on how the story should be told and that’s fine, it’s work for hire but in the end it doesn’t make the kind of comics I want to read.

Alright, now, it’s finally time for King City. King City was something that went through two different publishers, twelve issues and a couple years, and it came out on the other side as something that was really loved by a lot of people in the comic community. Now that you’re done and we’re pretty close to the release of the collection, how was the experience of creating this world and story? Are you satisfied with the final product?

Yeah very much so. I’m really happy with it and I’m thrilled that it’s clicked with other people.

A lot of how I started it grew out of my frustration with trying to make comics that I was trying sell to publishers. So I said fuck it and just worked on what I was most excited to do.

Aside from the many publishers (I went to) in the process of making it, I moved to three different cities, went through cancer, lost a nut, got a dumb tattoo on my neck and even met my misses and got married. It’s like my event comic.

(laughs) I love the Event Comic line. That’s great.

I had heard a little of the trials and tribulations that you’d run into over the past couple years. I’m sure that you already had a pretty good idea of where King City was going before those things started piling on, but do you think that things like that happening affected how you ultimately told the story in King City? Also, a belated congrats on making through that and meeting your wife.

Thanks, thanks.

Yeah, where the story went changed as I was working on it. That’s kind of my process too, I try to allow myself a lot of reworking as I go.

I remember talking to Bryan Lee O’Malley about the end of his Scott Pilgrim books and he was really into sticking with his original plan for the end even with a lot of ideas being thrown at him. At the same time I was watching a lot of Doctor Who and reading the fan reactions to where they thought it could go.

Looking at all that and also seeing how people were reacting to the first half of KC I got a lot of fun ideas on what could be done with it. My editor at Tokyopop, Troy Lewter, was a huge help in just throwing ideas at me. It made me more aware of my options.

Originally the end of it was going to be a huge war between cat masters and wolf masters but then when I got there I was more into spending time with the main characters rather than some big fight that had nothing to do with anything. I even finished a couple page scene that I cut from the final issues. I think it’ll be in the back of the collection though.

I feel like there’s a lot that you can do in a story and still not break the kind of deal you make with the reader when they go into it. So the end of KC was me testing that a little.

I think the ending is one of the best parts of King City. As you said, you originally planned it as a big fight to close the story, but it really ends up being more about the characters and finds Joe rejecting the idea that he inherently has a battle to fight because of his role as a Cat Master (“with great responsibility comes a great response…”). Were you concerned at all that doing that was “breaking the deal” you had with readers? Or was that not really something that worried you at all?

I think with that I was trying to stay on what was more important to me and fighting the urge to go with a big action ending. I grew up being into a lot of the kind of stories about an average dude who finds out he’s the chosen one and so he defeats all the evil in the universe and in a lot of that kind of stuff I feel like even if they start out felling grounded with relatable characters as soon as they get to that big ending, it can just fizzle out into just nonsense that has nothing to do with anything.

And there was also that element of me wanting to convey a feeling that life goes on. I didn’t want it to feel like I was showing you the biggest event that ever happened in King City, and in real life you don’t always do things when you are meant to and you don’t always get the girl and that doesn’t have to be shown as a defeat.

It’s nice when what you’re writing about can have some connection to something you’ve actually felt. I mean, that’s the goal.

It drives me crazy sometimes with X-Men how the mutants seem like they are meant to represent black people or gay people and then it gets to a point where you realize “oh it’s just nonsense. They’re just make believe mutants.”

Not that everything has to mean something, but it’s nice when it does.

I think one of the things I enjoyed the most about this comic was how real the world felt. King City felt like a real place, with real ideas and locations and imagination shoved into every corner. You could buy shoes in vending machines, there were notes written on bathroom stall walls, and there was depth and ideas conveyed in everywhere you could think to look. Does doing that kind of tie into your fascination with getting into the depths of a character’s day (like seeing Bond eat buttered toast) at a more macro level? How did you develop the world of King City, and did you look at anything in specific to help develop it visually at least?

Yeah, I think drawing out the details of the environment is on the same page as showing what a characters eating. Sometimes I’ll read a comic where an open book is on someone’s desk and if it’s drawn without any detail or personality it makes me feel like my vision is going bad. Like why can’t I read this open book that’s right in front of me — why are the pages blank?

Not that I’m Darrow drawing out everything, but I want to at least feel like I have some idea what’s on a page of a book when I draw it.

I think a lot of it was just me trying to draw a really fantastic version of cities I’ve lived in. So the stylization is just me trying to draw how NYC or Seattle felt but through all my comic book influences.

and obviously with any dumb jokes I could think of thrown in. I look at a lot of reference too, photos of cities. Sometimes I draw with a stack of magazines on my desk and just mix and match ideas from them for billboards or backgrounds. It was a big epiphany for me when I realized that I didn’t have to invent everything I drew from nothing. And the cool thing is that it seems like more effort to copy something exactly and a lot more fun to just riff off of it and come up with something new.

For those that have already read King City in issue form, what kind of extras can we expect in the collected edition?

I was wary of adding too much because I’m really into the fun of buying single issues and I didn’t want to make anyone who already bought the book feel like they were missing out.

There’s a couple minor things in there though, a lot of it’s just the fun I’m having in designing the thing, right now I’m working on french flaps with hidden drawings behind them.

And there’s a short scene I’m putting in the book that I cut from the final issue — not because I didn’t like it but because it set up more stuff with the other cat masters that I didn’t have the room to resolve.

What’s going on with Multiple Warheads? On your blog you said you’ve been pretty on fire with it for a bit, but I’m curious when you think we might expect the new number one and if it will still be with Oni?

Yeah, I’m about 10 pages away from done on the first chunk of it. It’s still with Oni and it’ll come out as a Alphabet to Infinity issue one of four — the first issue is 48 pages. I’m really happy with the stuff in it.

What other projects do you have coming up? Do you and Marian (Churchland, Brandon’s wife and fellow artist) ever discuss working on something together?

I’ve got some collections of my short, adult and color work planned.

Awhile back me and Marian were kicking around the idea of doing a book about a fantasy village set in the 1920’s with flappers and dragons. The idea was (to) show the island with maps and diagrams and print it as a big 11 by 17 book. But that might just be one of those ideas that never happens. She’s going to be pretty busy on her next big book for awhile. I’m really excited about the work she’s doing on it.

Sometimes I worry about the monster I’d turn into if I didn’t have a misses that drew better than me.