The new Archaia book “Strange Attractors” hits shelves tomorrow, and one of the book’s two artists, Robert Saywitz, took some time out of his schedule to talk with Multiversity about his contribution:
Can you look back and remember a single moment when you wanted to be an artist, or was it more of a natural progression?
Robert Saywitz: I don’t think there was one defining moment for me where I realized that I wanted to be an artist. I think my creativity was always there and slowly found its way to the surface as a natural progression. It continues to evolve and grow every day. As long as I can remember, I was drawing and even if it was just doodling, I needed to have paper and pencil in hand at all times. I look back at various notebooks or letters and almost every piece of paper I have has drawings on it. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an architect, but when I heard how much math was involved that sort of killed it for me. Interestingly, that sense of draftsmanship and very complex and structural elements have found their way into a lot of my artwork. The complexity maps for Strange Attractors, in some ways, began as very complex and methodical doodles.
Were there any artists in particular who inspired you?
RS: I’ve always seemed to find inspiration from a variety of artists from a pretty broad range of mediums—not just traditional fine artists and illustrators. What inspires me is a person’s creative process and their unique ability to tell a story, whether it be through painting, drawing, film, music, writing, design or photography. My list could go on forever but I think to name a few it would probably start something like William Kentridge, Otto Dix, Kathe Kollwitz, Francis Bacon, Dennis Hopper, Milton Glaser, Niklaus Troxler, Brian Selznick, Raymond Carver, Muddy Waters, Thelonious Monk…
This is your first comic work, correct? Were you interested in the medium before?
RS: I was interested in the medium and I’ve worked on other comic-related works such as Sal & Chrys—a New York romance about a storage warehouse building in Brooklyn that falls in love with the Chrysler building—and Strongman 2, but Strange Attractors is the first work that has been put out in print by a major publisher.
How did you connect with Charles Soule for Strange Attractors?
RS: I met Charles about six years ago here in New York. At the time, my friend, writer, and then-roommate Bryan Abrams, was working on a screenplay for a film that was going into production. Bryan and I had decided to collaborate on a graphic novel project but given that neither he nor I had ever drawn or written a graphic novel, we were both fairly uneducated about the graphic novel world and the creative process involved in getting a book made and published. Someone involved in Bryan’s film introduced him to Charles—as someone who had successfully transitioned into writing graphic novels—so Bryan and I met Charles for a beer to hopefully get some guidance on how we could quickly produce our idea for an epic graphic novel. After the second round of drinks, Charles helped us realize that our graphic novel idea may very well take us the rest of our natural lives to create and that our first step was to immerse ourselves in the graphic novel-world by reading everything we could get our hands on. After the third round of drinks, Charles hired me to illustrate his short story, Sal & Chrys, which was eventually on Dean Haspiel’s online comics site, Trip City. Since then, Charles and I have collaborated on various projects, including his Strongman graphic novel series and most recently, Strange Attractors. Needless to say, Bryan and I are still working on our saga-length graphic novel.
The book focuses on mathematical and scientific theories. Are any of the ideas in the book interests of yours?
RS: I’m definitely interested in science, but how it relates to creativity, art and our role as people in the universe. The fact that I am an artist living and working in New York City—riding subways every day and seeing the complexity, chaos and sometimes magic of this city—I was definitely interested in the ideas that Charles tries to tackle in the book. In fact, I’m currently working on a personal project that deals with these very issues of so many people living in New York and in such close quarters every day but still dealing with immense isolation.
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Your contributions to the book were some very intricate, abstract “maps” of personalities. How far along was the book when you were brought into the fold?
RS: I was actually brought in at the very beginning when Charles was putting together his pitch to show various publishers. At that time, he had an outline of his story, sample interior artwork and complete cover art. However, he needed a title design for the cover. I’m also a graphic designer—which helps to make ends meet when you’re an artist in New York—so he hired me to design the typographic elements for the cover, which was used on the published version. Once the book was bought by Archaia and Greg Scott started working on the interior art, Charles approached me about creating the maps.
Did Charles or Greg have ideas for how they wanted the maps to look, or did you have free reign?
RS: Greg is an insanely talented artist and he was creating all the interior artwork for Strange Attractors by hand (pencils and inks) which, given the length of the book and the complexity of the story, was going to occupy his time completely. These maps were a whole different animal and play such an integral part of the story that Charles knew he needed a different artist who could focus solely on these maps and create this unique visual language. Charles usually has a very clear vision of how he sees his words taking shape into pictures but with these maps, it was more that he had a sense of how things should feel. He gave me free reign as to how to actually build the language for each map. Charles is a great collaborator in that he knows what he wants, but he also knows how to get the best out of his artists and really let their creativity and ideas come forth to add value to the story. In the end it creates a high level of artistic storytelling.
Did you have many ideas for the maps before deciding on the final look, or did you know how you wanted them to look from the start?
RS: At the very beginning, I had no clue how these maps should look so I was excited for the challenge. For all the various kinds of maps in the book, the creative process was fairly organic in that Charles would simply convey a visual reference he had in mind (e.g., the complexity of aerial views of highways or the chaos of tangled wires) and—after gathering my own visual inspiration—I would create very rough thumbnail sketches. Once we liked where the idea was heading, I would expand those ideas into a more fully formed map language in tighter pencil renderings, then inks and digitally-colored final artwork. It was definitely a close collaboration where I would send in-progress images to Charles for his feedback so that we could tweak certain map elements to match the story. In the published Strange Attractors book, there’s a section at the end of the book where I describe the creative process for the individual maps as well as the inspiration for each.
How long did each map take to complete?
RS: The timing varied from map to map. In the beginning, I spent a lot of time focusing on Dr. Brownfield’s notebook maps with different ways to convey the map language. Once I had created the overall look and feel, I expanded those ideas into the rest of the maps. Since I was working on a few projects simultaneously, it’s hard to quantify each map into specific hours. Quite a bit of time went into the initial sketching part of the process trying to come up with the overall look behind each map, but once that was fully formed, the execution usually flowed pretty quickly. The four-panel fold-out map of Heller in the middle of the book definitely took the most amount of time to conceptualize and execute because it was incredibly complex—both in content and how it needed to be created. I began with a background landscape resembling a hybrid of robotic innards and a vast futuristic highway system. Once Charles and I agreed upon the overall look and feel, I taped four pages of bristol paper together and created the structural layer of artwork as if it was one giant canvas stretched out to 44˝ wide by 17˝ tall. On separate sheets of bristol, overlaid on a light table, I drew a second layer of connector lines and dots, visually reminiscent of a stellar constellation map. On a third layer, I charted the areas of chaos and after inking, composited each layer together on the computer for the final colorization process. In the end, the reader is seeing this map as a four panel foldout of continuous artwork but it was actually made of 12 panels composited together.
Are you working on anything else at the moment?
RS: I’m always working on multiple projects with more of a focus on one, which usually means it has a hard deadline. At the moment I’m working on some commissioned illustration work for a New York design firm, writing and illustrating a short story, continuing to work with Bryan Abrams on our epic graphic project and hopefully talking with Charles about our next amazing collaboration.
