As a follow-up to our interview with rising star artist Declan Shalvey, we’ve got a special feature: Declan walking us through the process of creating one of our favorite pages from a recent issue of Thunderbolts (#160 to be exact). This page depicts Ghost’s assault on the hammer powered Juggernaut’s mind, as the team attempts to wrest control back into Cain Marko’s hands. It’s a unique and very well executed page, and one that shows off the talent Shalvey has an as artist.
Click past the jump to see this art process piece, in Declan’s words himself.
Declan Shalvey: With the sequence in Juggernaut’s mindscape, I remember reading it on the subway in New York and thought to myself ‘How the hell am I gonna draw this!?!’ Once I got over that fear though, I remember being really excited that I got to do something genuinely challenging in the issue. I mean, all the scenes with Juggernaut as this huge unstoppable force was a challenge, but the mindscape scene was such an outside-the-box scenario and I had to really think about how I was going to approach and construct the scene. I regularly hear people complain about how boring and generic superhero comics are, and while there are certainly examples of that, I loved that I was doing such an ‘out-there’ scene in a mainstream superhero book.
Jeff called for Juggernaut’s mindscape to be like a ‘German abstract expressionist painting’ So, I looked up various examples of that type of work and started to dig around to find something that tied into what was in my brain. I ended up using a lot of Kandinski paintings in trying to visualise all this. It was all about establishing the ‘universe’ of the scene, introduce all the wacky elements, and keep the story moving throughout the double-page spread. Since the scene ends with them at the head of the serpent, I made the last panel the Serpent’s head, and aid the body of the snake abound the spread, linking all the panels together. Hopefully, you didn’t notice til the end, but I was trying to subtly lead the reader along the path the Tbolts take, even with all the craziness involved. I wanted to make sure no matter how nuts the scene had to be, that Frank Martin (colourist) wouldn’t have to do some crazy photoshop effect in order to sell it. I wanted to have 95% of it on the page.
With the Kandinski-ness of the ‘world’ decided, I depicted it with lines and more geometric shapes. It’s all pretty abstract. I felt, in order to keep the characters noticeable, I should try a different approach. I knew I wanted to specifically break down Ghost into more simplistic shapes, as if he was a relief woodcut print from a similar era to Kandinski. I have a Degree in Fine Art printmaking, so it was nice to get some use out of those Art History classes. With the layout already established, the pencils meant I had to just figure out where to place all my shapes and break down all the other elements for inking.
I rarely ever use a ruler, but by god I used one this time! Most of the work had already been established; inking was more about not messing up everything I had planned! At one stage my girlfriend felt that the icons I was using for the other T-bolts weren’t working 100%. She suggested that I look at Egyptian cryptographs to portray them. It was a good note, as it helped them stand out from the abstract-y background and Ghost too.
Thankfully, It all came together in the end. I was really surprised with the positive reaction to the sequence. I was afraid I had gone too far and lost the audience. In any case, it was a really challenging section of an already challenging issue and I’m really happy with how it came out. Really happy everyone else liked it too.
