Simon Roy Uncovers “Jan’s Atomic Heart” and Other Stories [Interview]

If I said the name Simon Roy to you, chances are that if you’re a fan of this site and the things we like you’ll think of the comic “Prophet.” Re-launched in 2011 as part of the Extreme Studios revival at Image with Brandon Graham, Roy was the artist initially attached to the revitalization before the book opened up to the anthology it has since become — though Roy remains one of our favorite artists to grace the pages of that book.

However, in late March, Simon Roy is bringing an anthology of his own to Image entitled “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories.” Full of stories that he did up to 2011, it’s a fantastic anthology full of interesting shorts and stories that showcase Simon’s various talent and interests. Not only that, but in April, Roy is launching a new mini-series entitled “The Field” with writer Ed Brisson, in which an amnesiac wakes up naked in a field and immediately finds himself on a wild and unpredictable ride.

Simon’s keeping busy, is what I’m trying to say. And you can expect a lot of great things from him in 2014.

We’ll have an advance review of his book later today on the site as well as a chat with Ed Brisson about “The Field,” but for now, read on as we chat with Simon about coming up in comics, his work on “Prophet,” “Jan” and more.

So I’m going to start with my staple conversation question and we can move on from there, but the first thing I usually like to ask people the first time I interview them is: why comics?

Simon Roy: Oh yeah, the classic “why comics.” It’s a good question. The thing, too, with being a human with a fallible memory, I don’t know how consistent I am with this story. I think it’s the same story, but I don’t know.

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid, like “Asterix” and “Tintin” and “Archie” — lots of “Archie” — and then I drew comics just for fun a lot in high school. Then, after a couple of years in university studying Russian, I was looking at the stuff I was working on for my own pleasure and kind of thinking about possible career paths with the degree I was pursuing. I was also looking at a bunch of new releases of comics at the time, and I kept on finding these… like, the worst science fiction trash, and I was like, “Man, I could do better than this. These look terrible!” So that kind of pushed me. So, ok, maybe I’ll go to art school, and I’ll go to art school and see what I can do from there. And, yeah, then I drew “Jan’s Atomic Heart” during my first year there and… that kind of started the ball rolling.

I think it’s perfect that you mention an interest in Russian and sci-fi, because I was going to actually bring that up as two of the most prevalent things I noticed in your work, with this fascination with cosmonauts and all of the stories being pretty science fiction-y.

SR: Yeah, well, I think they’re connected. I’ve always liked science fiction because it’s a place where you can suspend your disbelief in a way that’s easier for me than in fantasy or in other kinds of genres. There’s the implication that science fiction could happen sometime in the future, right? And having that little thing there, I don’t know, it helps me believe whatever the story is a lot more. And I grew up reading science fiction and all that, so I’ve always been really connected to it, and comfortable doing stuff in that area.

But, the Russian stuff? I think it kind of comes out of that. Being really into genre-fiction and that kind of stuff, and then learning… Russia is one of those places that has, like, this amazing fantasy-ish history that spans thousands of years and is full of some of the huge ups and downs that all civilization has gone through, or all Western civilization at least. And they’ve suffered through Communism, and the scope of the place and of the culture and all that has always been really fascinating to me. Especially learning about the Soviet period, because it was a giant Communist dictatorship made up of hundreds of different cultures, and it managed to almost kind of not collapse for seventy years, you know?

And, this is a little rambley, but being a North American where all the traces of previous cultures from before two hundred years ago when Europeans settled North America, all the artifacts were made out of perishable materials that rotted away or were actively destroyed by Europeans as they colonized. So looking at places in the old world, where you can see the history of the place with every step you take, where all of the history is coexisting at once — like in Kiev, the university I went to for a month in 2008, they had this church there and it was a thousand years ago, and the campus it was on was a Soviet submarine officer school previously with big mosaics of submarines and Lenin and shit, built maybe in the 60’s or 50’s. And beside that, there’d be some brand new thing a Ukranian oligarch had built with his ill-gotten money. So you had all these interesting tension between the different ages of this country all coexisting in a very interesting way.

I think that kind of touches some things? [Laughs]

Excerpt from Homeward Bound

Cycling backwards a little bit, I wanted to ask you about — you mentioned that you first started drawing in high school, right?

SR: Yeah, well, I’ve always been a kid who draws.

How did you first get into drawing and then illustrating?

SR: I’m not sure. I’ve always been kind of an indoor kid, in some ways. I like to go out and explore, but as a kid I was much more of a solitary explorer than a sports player. I think I just kind of had an inclination towards being by myself and drawing already. I just kept doing that instead of doing other things that kids do, and that kind of gained momentum to the point where I was like, well, I’m getting pretty good at this so maybe I should just focus on this and that’ll be it, that’ll be the thing I do. I think that kind of covers it. [Laughs]

So, I don’t know. Basically, just trying to find a way to get to draw things and explore things that I want to draw and explore. And then make a living doing that. My degree from the Alberta College of Art and Design was a design degree with a specialization in character design, since that covered closer to what I wanted to be doing. Instead of illustration where you’re trying to make these beautiful, iconic one-off images for every job, I liked the idea of the character design stuff because it’s more about people and storytelling and that kind of thing. I do some illustration work every so often now, but my focus has very much been about narrative.

See, it’s interesting to me to hear you talk about where your interest and influence comes from, like how you liked exploring, and one of the thoughts I’ve had while looking at your work — especially bound up in this collection — is that one thing you clearly like working with is exotic landscapes.

SR: Yeah. I’ve been finding, when I’ve enjoyed drawing “Prophet” the most is when I get to draw something that I haven’t drawn before. Because it’s “Prophet,” it’s not going to be, like, “Draw a new, 3-point perspective cityscape,” you know? With tons of technical details and shit. It’s more like, “There’s a mountain that’s also a giant, and there’s a giant robot on top of that mountain giant. Turn it into something.” So, yeah, I really enjoy getting to do strange new things that don’t involve… like, things that I can relax into and draw without worrying too much about it.

I think that’s mainly, like, there’s something with “Prophet” that’s nice where I can relax and not worry too much about consistency since everything’s so fucked up and alien. It doesn’t really matter if I stay to the model sheet, outside of the particular character that needs to be recognizable from panel to panel. When every scene is a different part of a ship that’s made out of giant internal organs, you don’t have to worry too much about keeping on sheet.

And I imagine that your just general fascination of science fiction can certainly tie into that, because if you’re looking at from the perspective of what could potentially exist than there’s an infinite range of how to bring that to life.

SR: Exactly. I always like to think about the long term processes of nature and society, all that kind of things. The long lines of causality that make things the way they are. Doing big, weird alien landscapes is nice because you kind of get to go into that and you get to think, OK, well, here’s the premise — where would that premise have come from? What’s the history that would inform this thing that I’m drawing? That’s just a fun thing that I think helps with the process.

So with the stories that are in “Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories,” and obviously these are pre-“Prophet” and much earlier in your career, but I think a lot of these particular landscapes are relatively grounded in reality and it’s all of the people, the giant bugs, all these things that are more science-fictional. Now, with “Prophet” and how you’ve moved on to a bigger scope, but here when you’re focusing on a smaller scale from robots to cosmonauts and their weaponry, how did you evolve these things from a real place into creating these sci-fi iterations of things on a smaller plane?

SR: I think a lot of it has to do with the believability thing I was talking about earlier. I think at the place I was at when I was making all these stories was a much more grounded place, where I wasn’t really comfortable getting too crazy. I didn’t want to draw some big crazy sci-fi landscape because, well, what’s this landscape about? This looks stupid. There’s nothing real about it.

Where “were you” while you were making these?

SR: I think all of them were done mainly while I was in Calgary, studying there. Which is in Alberta on the right side of the Rockies, so it’s… I grew up on the west coast where it never gets cold, where it’s always nice and green and rainy, so living in Calgary where it’s much colder and dryer and barren, a little bit more depressing in some ways — …I think I’m getting lost here a little bit in my story. [Laughs]

Well, if I understand correctly, some of these were art school projects, right?

SR: I did them in art school, but they weren’t for projects. They were just things that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to do in my courses. So, I think the grounded element of it all also comes from just, like, as a teenager being really into airplanes and guns, being that kind of nerd. I liked nature stuff, but as a kid I really dug all the visuals and the feel of all that military stuff. The utilitarian things designed specifically for killing people. There’s kind of an honesty to the purpose so you can make them really ugly and interesting.

In terms of looking at it from a more removed perspective, the last couple stories — “Homeward Bound, “Hunter Killer” — seem really integrated with the landscape that they take place in. But earlier, and I’m assuming the stories in this book are how you made them chronologically, with “Jan’s Atomic Heart,” it’s a lot more focused on the character than everything around them.

SR: I think that’s also just trying to learn how to write characters, I guess. There is a bit of all these that are experimental; I can’t objectively say how well they work, but they were stepping stones, learning how to think about characters and voice. I’m almost worried about — and maybe don’t include this in the interview [Laughs] — but do all the characters, do they all just speak with my voice?

Excerpt from Jan's Atomic Heart

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Pieces of the writer always come out into the stories. But even in terms of process, looking at the pages like for “Jan,” it’s a lot… cleaner is not the word I’m looking for, but as we get into the later stories everything is seemingly a lot more involved where you focus on the background details, whereas these opening stories, “The Cosmonauts” and “Jan,” are much more character oriented. When did you decide to pull back and do world-building as much as the character development?

SR: I think world-building is something that genre-fans in all mediums are into a lot now. People like the big immersive world, and I remember as a teenager, the stories that I tried to make were always plot- and world-driven. They never really connect to anything real, but it was just making a big science fiction pile of stuff where this will be cool, maybe this will work. But at the end of the day, it’s not really a coherent story with anything human to connect to. So most of the stories in this are kind of me trying to learn how to create believable characters in fairly limited spaces. I think as I got more comfortable with that, and also more confident in drawing and drawing weird stuff, and as I got to enjoy that more, it just kind of naturally took me away from character driven stuff and more into, hey, wanna draw some crazy shit? That’s the internal conversation, anyway.

You talked a little bit about sci-fi stories that might focus more on the world that they’re in rather than the characters in them, but could you give a couple examples of the sort of stuff that has influenced you?

SR: Like, from a science-fiction perspective, or just in general? I don’t know. Lately, in the past few years, sci-fi prose authors have really been helpful. Jack Vance, he’s actually a really good example of a world-building science fiction guy because in lots of his best or most interesting books, he just kind of takes a fairly simple character and he doesn’t really care that much about him, he just uses that character to drag you through this big crazy world that he’s built. The character might not change that much or in interesting ways, but he’ll go to a place where there’s a race of giant bug men who have human slaves, and the human slaves have been breeding themselves to look more like the bug men so they can serve the bug men better. And the bug men have convinced the humans that when they die they’ll metamorphize into real bug men, so it’s fun ideas like that that he’s more concerned with, you know?

On the opposite end of the spectrum is stuff like Ursula K. Le Guin. Well, maybe not opposite because she builds very convincing worlds, but she’s always focused on the very human elements of it all. It’s very emotionally grounded and it all feels very real, even when there’s weird terminology and stuff. Everyone is always acting very believable and human, so you can really believe and get into the story.

Earlier, you had mentioned that you were reading a lot of “Asterix” and “Tintin” as a kid. Has that still translated over? I feel like the one thing that I always see when people talk about “Prophet,” and I think it fits in pretty well with some of the stories in here, but everyone’s always talking about how it’s an American version of a European comic.

SR: Oh, I don’t know. I read “Asterix” and “Tintin,” but I didn’t read Moebius or Tardi or any of the not-for-kids European stuff until the past few years. But I think the aesthetic of “Asterix” and “Tintin” are really good, because they’ve got very simple … well, maybe not simple, but very expressive characters and expressive characters who live in this hyper-detailed world. The world is a character that helps you get the story; there’s always enough detail so you can place it, like, inside the Chief’s house in “Asterix,” where there’s these unnecessary details about the stool or the pot in the corner or whatever. I think that aesthetic has translated into the way I do things.

So putting this book together and revisiting all of this work from your past, actually having a physical item that you can hold where you can see how you’ve grown as a storyteller overtime, is there anything in this book where you’ve thought, “Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that this early,” or “I wish I hadn’t done this”? Looking at all of this now together in 2014, what is it you take away from your own artistic growth from this book?

SR: A lot of different things. One thing that I noticed in this and in some of the stuff I’ve found from high school is that little visual things I do to avoid having to draw things that actually turn out cool. Like, doing lots of stuff with silhouettes and cropping things weird and using big word balloons to cover up chunk of detail you’d otherwise have to draw. Stuff like that that I haven’t really thought about because I’m competent enough now that, whatever it is, I’ll just figure out how to draw it. But that kind of lazy innovation to get out of drawing these detailed things, I don’t know, it lead to some interesting stuff that I’d like to try and grab hold of.

And one thing I forgot to ask is, how are these stories originally released? If at all.

SR: Some weren’t. “The Cosmonauts” wasn’t, “Hunter Killer” wasn’t, but “Jan’s Atomic Heart” got published in 2009 by Ed Brisson, who I’m working with on a series now, back when he had a little small press publishing company that he has since closed up and put away. That came out in 2009, and good business managed to get it to “Heavy Metal Magazine” in 2010, largely because Brandon (Graham) forwarded it’s way to the right people and it found its way there. “Homeward Bound,” I originally drew to try and get into the big Image anthology “Popgun”; I think it was after the second one came out and I met Joe Keatinge and chatted him up, and offered, hey, if you guys are doing another one I’d love to do a story. So I put that story together, and that Popgun thing never really happened.

That’s too bad. That’s my favorite story here.

SR: Yeah, I’ve always kind of liked the tone of conversational animals. If you’ve ever read Anders Nilsen’s “Big Questions,” the conceit of having little innocent animals talking about big issues is a really nice sneaky thing, I think.

But, yeah, a lot of those stories ended up going onto Study Group 12, which is Zack Soto and other people’s anthology website. I think that’s it. I think only two of them made it into print, “Jan’s Atomic Heart” and “Good Business” made it into print. It was all either online or just on my computer, just waiting to have something happen to them. [Laughs]

Do you have a favorite out of all these stories? Is there one that you are particularly more proud of than the others?

SR: I kind of like “Homeward Bound” a lot, and “Hunter Killer.” I had a lot of fun trying to put little pieces of narrative in the story that aren’t directly talked about. Like, “Homeward Bound” is all about two magpies finding a crashed shuttle, and for me a lot of the fun was thinking, well, who are the people on the shuttle? What are they trying to do? Why have they crashed here? I think I’ve put a lot of little clues onto the suits of the space men and onto the crashed shuttle that kind of give some idea of what’s going on without having to sit down and give you a bunch of exposition that bores you. Maybe you’ll pick up on it, maybe you won’t. It’s more fun for me to draw, and hopefully more fun to read that way.

The same thing with “Hunter Killer.” Having the characters talking very casually about these humongous space things and other colonies in outer space, but in a very grounded way so you don’t have to stop and think about it. Maybe you pick up stuff that’s there, maybe you don’t, either way hopefully it works.

Excerpt from Hunter Killer

Do you find, with these two in mind, do you find that you prefer to do shorter stories than the more longform comics?

SR: That’s hard to say. I haven’t really been in a position to be doing either kinds of works for a little while. I’ve been working on “Prophet” on and off for the past three years, and I’m starting another little short series with Ed Brisson in April. I haven’t really had the chance to sit down and, aside from doing, like, plotting on outlines that I’m slowly building, I haven’t really had a chance to do a long or short contained work in a while.

So I guess my answer is: I don’t know, man. [Laughs]

Well I think we’d be kind of remiss not to talk about “The Field” a little bit. With your new book with Ed, it’s a mini-series about and, if I understand correctly, this guy just wakes up in a field in his underwear but he has no idea how he got there. And it sounds very much like that thing Ed was tweeting about a long time ago.

SR: Yeah, apparently that’s the root of it. The root of it comes out of that. I don’t want to say too much about the plot because it’s… well, you know. It’s kind of something we want to tease out there, but it’s fun for me because, story-wise, it’s kind of a Twilight Zone premise where you don’t know what’s going on and you slowly have to piece it together for yourself. Which is a nice experience, but it’s also really momentum-based. This character is just being propelled by circumstance and violence across the prairies outside Saskatoon, and that’s a cool idea for me.

And you and Ed had collaborated before, because you’d done one of his “Murder Book” anthologies, right?

SR: Yeah, I did a couple true crime stories for him.

And those are rather decidedly different, and even “The Field” is different from what we’re used to now from you. Because you usually do these big sci-fi landscape type stories, right? So is it too spoiler-y to ask if “the Field” is even something science fiction-y, or is it more grounded than normal for you?

SR: It’s not science fiction-y enough for me to be drawing some sci-fi stuf in it. If there are some science fiction elements in there, they’re not important enough to be part of the main theme. It’s all super grounded, which is, again, being able to do whatever I felt like in some ways with “Prophet,” it’s interesting to try and go the opposite direction and try and really establish something that already exists. But, you know, a translated version of that.

Since “The Field” is set more in a real world, is there a different process in terms of working on the book? Since you don’t do what you might on “Prophet” with a living mountain and a robot on his head.

SR: In some ways, it’s a lot different because with “Prophet,” I like to just design aliens once I get to the page. “I guess this alien will be here, I’ll invent him as I start to draw him,” you know? But with this, you know, I have to keep the characters much more consistent and believable from page to page. Which is something I guess I haven’t actually worried too much about for a while.

I don’t know. At the end of the day it’s still about making characters and action and whatnot that’s really textured and believable. Instead of making crazy landscapes, it’s about getting these characters to act well, you know? So make sure they’re emoting enough and their body language is communicating what I want it to, that kind of thing. Which is itself something I haven’t really thought about for a while, so it’s a nice challenge to make all these characters feel like real people existing in a real space.

There’s no emoting in “Prophet.” There’s only stoic looks and slightly sad stoic looks. [Laughs]

I imagine that pulls out different things from you in order to get that down. I know a lot of people take photo references for their characters and things like that, but is that something that you do for this type of book?

SR: Not really. I think it’s mainly, the thing that slows me down is just finding… the lead character drives a Datsun B-210, so I decided that was something I was going to get a bunch of good references for and try to make that consistent. I don’t think I’m worried too much about getting it all super accurate.

And in terms of how you and Ed are doing the book together, I know with “Prophet” it’s interesting because Brandon’s good about making sure everybody has an equal credit and the way we talk about an artist’s role is often secondary these days, so what’s interesting about “The Field” is you actually get the primary credit over Ed on this.

SR: Yeah. I don’t know what that’s about, man. [Laughs] I think, one thing that’s really good with this is that I know Ed fairly well. We know each other, so he’s, like, “What do you want to draw in here?” He still hasn’t included a severed head yet, which is one thing I’m really pushing for in “The Field.” I want there to be something with severed heads, I want to see if we can do that.

Just, like, a basement full of them or something?

SR: See, that might be too far! [Laughs] Maybe just one severed head, maybe there’s more punch to that. One out of context severed head. That will do wonders.

And that would be perfect for what you’re talking about where you put it in as a detail and don’t explain it, and leave it for the reader to figure out why it’s there.

SR: Right, because this is like a Twilight Zone-esque weird story. I feel like I have a lot of freedom to do a lot of little weird things in the background and get kind of comfortably crazy with the action and with the occasional character, depending on who he or she is. Did I answer that? [Laughs]

I think I understand that. [Laughs] So looking at this collection again, I mean, are you excited for people to see it, for people that are fans of your work in “Prophet” to look at how you evolved as an artist? I imagine this is kind of a scary thing.

SR: It is, yeah. I feel like I’m less excited and more just a little bit anxious and embarrassed. It’s going to come out now, hopefully people don’t think it sucks. [Laughs] I don’t know. I always like seeing that kind of stuff from other artists, so I am hoping that there’s some of that for people who know me from “Prophet” and like my stuff and want to see what other things I do.

And in terms of the other things that you would like to do, is stuff like this, an anthology graphic novel (I don’t know if there’s a better term for it), is that something that you’d like to do more of in the future? Or are you looking to do more like “The Field” or longform stories like “Prophet”?

SR: What I’m scheming to do in the next couple years is try and to do a lot more longform stuff that I’m writing myself and maybe drawing myself. I’m not sure. Again, trying to connect those two elements where, with stuff about scale like the big science fiction stuff, things that feel huge and ancient and all of that, but also connecting that to the more grounded universal human character stuff. So, that’s what I’d like to be working on in the near future.

Actually, I’ve also got a collection of ice-age shamanic adventure stories I’m putting together right now for Dark Horse that will be coming out sometime in the next year or so — so I’ll probably be spending most of the next year either in the far future or the deep past!

“Jan’s Atomic Heart and Other Stories” goes on sale March 26th, and is available for pre-order now with Diamond Order Code JAN140546 with a final order cut off date of March 3rd — so get your orders in now!