Since he wrapped up production on the highly labor-intensive Ring series in April of 2001, Russell has been hard at work on a smattering of eclectic short stories for various publishers, many of which he details in the following interview. But his single biggest effort since completing The Ring has been adapting one of Neil Gaiman's best-loved prose short stories, Murder Mysteries, to graphic novel format. Murder Mysteries is a clever contemporary tale that recounts, in story-within-a-story form, the first crime ever -- a murder in paradise -- which takes place in the kingdom of Heaven before man or even the universe as we know it exists.
Fans of both Russell and Gaiman will be nothing less than thrilled with this beautiful project, which is being published by Dark Horse Maverick as a hardcover graphic novel. And if you're a comics fan who has yet to explore the wondrous work of P. Craig Russell, this book makes a divine starting place. Read on to enjoy our candid interview with Russell, and see for yourself why he's one of our most respected and charming creators.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: Since we're here to talk about your upcoming book release, Murder Mysteries, it might be good to start by chatting a little about the writer of that story, Neil Gaiman. I'm curious when you first met Neil and how that came about?
P. Craig Russell: Ooh, wow. I don't remember (laughs). It must've been through Sandman.
You know I happen to have dozens of message from Neil on my answering machine, so I don't know if we talked on the phone before we met in person. I've got my answering machine messages from an old machine on tape from as far back as 1984. I've always threatened to edit Neil's old messages together onto one tape and sell it at conventions as "Messages from Neil" (laughs). It's sort of like an audio scrapbook. For some reason, whenever he's called, I've never been home. So I get these really cool messages from him where he just sort of talks to the tape and leaves his ideas. They're great to listen to. Now I've got a digital machine, of course, so I don't save the messages any more, but I do have quite an interesting collection from before.
SE-G: Well, however you did meet, it sounds like you got off to a pretty nice start.
PCR: Oh, yeah. I remember one of our first conversations: he said when he was writing Sandman 50, Ramadan, that he wrote it with me in mind. And he said, "If I was writing this for Charlie Vess, I'd put a genie in it. I write for the artist." And of course, ego-maniac me thinks "I can draw genies! What's wrong with my genies?"
SE-G: (laughs) So it's been -- what? -- 15 years or so that you've known Neil?
PCR: Not quite -- Ramadan was our first project together, and that was in 1991, I believe. Oh wait, I lie! We had worked together before on One Life Furnished in Early Moorcock. This is when I was working on Elric: Stormbringer, and he called me and said he was going to fax over this story he'd just written. And since I was in the thick of Stormbringer, it seemed like such a natural lead-in that I right away said "Why don't I adapt this and we'll run it in Stormbringer?" Which, of course, had been his intent all along ...it was like a little fish-hook he used to grab me.
SE-G: Was it simply from adapting that story that you decided you'd like to adapt another of his short prose stories?
PCR: Well, that was the first story of Neil's that I worked on that started as a prose story and not a comic script. Ramadan was written as a comic script. After that I did Only the End of the World Again for another artist, Troy Nixey. Neil and Bob Schreck (Schreck was then-Editor-In-Chief of Oni Comics -- ed.) asked me to do the adaptation -- you know, write the script and design or lay-out the pages, which I've done a number of times over the years for other people. Of course, once I did it, I desperately wanted to draw it myself. You know, I had this structure, this blueprint going, and I really wanted to do it.
It was about the same time, the early '90s, when I did that single illustration for Neil's book of short stories, Angels and Visitations. In that book, I provided the single illustration for Murder Mysteries. Now, Neil has a different recollection of this than I do. He said in a recent interview, or on his website, that after I illustrated the story I told him, "I want to do this."
As I recall, he said, "Now this one is for you; take as long as you want, it'll be there whenever you get around to doing it."
So, "Rashomon." I'm not sure which is right, but I'm sure glad we got together on it.
It took about eight years. It doesn't seem like that, but there were so many projects between those years. There was The Ring, for one (laughs)...but that was just a knock-off!
Eventually these things come around. It took me 23 years to get to The Ring, so I guess eight years to get to Murder Mysteries isn't that big of a stretch.
SE-G: Were you working on Murder Mysteries simultaneously with The Ring at any point? It seems like you got to this pretty quickly, knowing how intensive The Ring was for you.
PCR: No, once I finished The Ring -- last April, almost a year ago now -- I spent several months just working on layouts and scripts for other stories. I did an Oscar Wilde fairy tale, I went back to Slaughterhouse 5, that I'd done 12 years ago for another artist that never got published -- I went back and played around with those lay-outs, and then I did Murder Mysteries and a couple of other things. So I played around with not much drawing, but working on these structures.
SE-G: Was it fun for you to work on a number of different things after being so focused on one project for so long?
PCR: Oh, yes. And right now I'm doing this three-page story for Fantagraphics on the life of the composer Eric Wolfgang Korngold. I also did that two-page adaptation of In Flanders Fields for the September 11 benefit book. And then there were some Spectre covers for DC -- it's fun jumping around to a lot of smaller projects for a while. Murder Mysteries, at 64 pages, compared to The Ring, is small, but a 64-page book is still a major commitment of time. I completed it in two months with a break, and then another two months. I did a marathon from January second or third to February 23rd, I think. So I did it in two big, walloping chunks.
SE-G: Would you say you're an efficient artist? I don't know that most people would guess that by looking at your work.
PCR: When I get on a roll like that I will work for months. I guess my record is going from January 2 to April 28 last year on The Ring. I took two days off to drive to Virginia Beach to see my mom, and those two days were just the travelling. On the days I was there I did lay-outs for the Buffy story I did for Tales of the Slayers.
When I go on a trip I like to have something there. Some people take knitting, I take layouts. I'll sit there at my mom's or my brother's and do thumbnails.
SE-G: It seems pretty remarkable that you could get that much done in the last year. Hearing you recount each of those projects only makes me think of how many artists have a hard time getting two or three issues out a year. That's a pretty standard rate, so is this really tough for you?
PCR: Yeah, but a lot of small ones -- two or three-pagers. Although this three-pager I'm working on now is as detailed as anything I've ever done. And it's square-format, so they are larger-size pages.
In a good year I will pencil and ink 125 pages this. This year, because of The Ring, I think it'll be about a hundred or a little less. I really did slow down a little bit. When I finished The Ring, I thought, "I'll take a couple days, maybe a week off." Then it was two weeks and three weeks, and then it gets really hard to get that ball rolling again.
SE-G: So when you decided it was finally time to get started on Murder Mysteries, did you call Neil and say "I'm ready to do this?" Was he that involved in that project from the start?
PCR: It came about in part in working out the Ring contract with Dark Horse. I knew that Dark Horse wanted a Neil Gaiman project, and I knew I had this one in my back pocket, so I took it to Dark Horse when we were sort of renegotiating the Ring contract. So it actually sort of worked out as part of the package. There were a whole bunch of different things in this one great, big package -- thirteen issues of Star Wars inks and then one issue of pencils and inks, the Buffy story, and Murder Mysteries, and they were all included in the Ring contract. I'm doing five, almost six, solid years of work for Dark Horse.
SE-G: You said you recall Neil Gaiman saying he set Murder Mysteries aside for you -- what is it about the story that makes it "for you?" And what about it made you want to adapt it?
PCR: I partly liked the challenge that it was different for me. I do a lot of otherworldly, or ancient, or historical, or classical, or whatever, but very little of this modern world. And this story was set in Los Angeles of ten years ago, so it's very contemporary, at least compared to Norse mythology (laughs). At the same time, a lot of it was set in Heaven, with angels, so you know, wings and fantasy, and the Silver City. So it didn't go too far afield from the kind of thing I do. And yet I really like the structure of playing with going back and forth between this fantasy place, because it's made up of constant flashbacks. Or flash-forward -- in the middle of the story, we're suddenly back on the park bench in Los Angeles, listening to this old man tell the story.
So it was an interesting structure, going between these two visual places, and I like that. I think it's an interesting structure for a story and feels a bit more contemporary.
SE-G: It seems like your transitions between those places are very natural. You don't seem to be going out of your way to signify "this is a time change!"
PCR: You don't have to make a big deal out of it when you're doing a big time change. You can do things visually that hint at differences. Mostly we just planned for color. This story's taking place at night, so we had a completely different color palette than when we were in Heaven. Also, I only used the bleeds on the page on the contemporary scenes. So when we're in Heaven, there are always wide margins on four sides of the page. When we come back to the present day, those panels are full-bleed. They run off the page, top to bottom. It's not a glaring thing, but it helps.
SE-G: That's nice. I didn't notice that when I read it, but it does present the heavenly scenes as being framed at a point in time.
PCR: Exactly.
SE-G: Did you go back and forth with Neil at all over your layouts? Or did he let you take the project to adapt as you saw it?
PCR: Pretty much. When I finished a lot of the artwork, when I had copies of the pencils, I sent copies to him just to let him know how it was coming along. One suggestion he made early on was to remind me that this takes place in L.A. and it's hot, and they're in a heat wave and all that, but it happens around Christmas. So there are certain hints, especially with angels around, which tie in with a rather subtle way to what's going on in Heaven with the angels. And of course, it takes place in Los Angeles, the City of Angels.
SE-G: It does seem fairly sardonic, with all of the "angels" that are shown in the contemporary scenes of Christmas. To have an actual, heavenly angel among those symbols of angels is pretty dark humor.
PCR: You have real angels in heaven, then there is this little tin angel atop a cheesy little Christmas tree in this sad little L.A. apartment. That tin angel makes an appearance several times in the story, and at a sort of climactic point, where we see it lying on the floor. You know that means something, too.
SE-G: At the start of most of your stories, you list an Opus number. For people who may recently have discovered your work, can you explain why you do that and what it means?
PCR: The Opus number just stands for the number of stories I've done. Murder Mysteries is Opus 51 because it's the 51st story I've done. I don't count when I do inks or layouts for other artists, but if it's a story that's pretty much my idea of what a story can be, for credit or blame, the buck stops here. It means I've done the layouts and the inks. Once in a while, I'll work with another artist, but it will basically reflect my vision of the story. But the "Opus" doesn't mean anything more than that -- it doesn't mean a story is particularly important. I've put it on some pretty schlocky superhero books, too!
SE-G: So it's more for your reference and for fans who follow you closely enough to know to look for it?
PCR: Yes. If anyone does like my work, it gives them something to look for. Also, a lot of artists work in series, especially more so in the past than now, it seems. So if Walt Simonson was doing Thor and you liked Walt Simonson, you just knew every month where Walt Simonson was going to be. I do a lot of one-shot projects, because I do adaptations and the opera stuff and the Oscar Wilde stuff, so it gives a guide to people who enjoy my work. If they pick up something that's numbered, and maybe there's a skip in numbers between the last project of mine they read and the current one, they know there's something else out there. And hopefully they'll go look for it.
SE-G: One thing I've been wondering is whether or not you've been working on anything that's original and written by you, as opposed to being an adaptation?
PCR: Some of my early Night Music stories I wrote myself. I did some things called Symbolist Fantasies that were stories without words, and this piece I'm working on now called "Between Two Worlds," which is the first graphic essay I've done. It's about a real-life person, telling the story of his life. I'm sort of wandering into Pekar, Crumb, Sacco territory here, and it's fun. There are real historical people and places in it, and yet because this person wrote operas and film scores, there's the chance to play with that imagery: images from the operas, Errol Flynn as Robin Hood makes an appearance, Vienna in 1910, and Strauss and Puccini and Mahler. So it has a lot of the stuff in it that I like to draw, and yet it's a documentary.
SE-G: One more question before I let you go: You've been recognized repeatedly -- especially lately for The Ring -- with awards and nominations for awards in response to your work. How much do awards mean to you as an artist?
PCR: I know it sounds like a real cliché to say, but getting a nomination is the best -- as good as winning -- because you see some of the people who are nominated, too, and they are really terrific people. I don't mind losing to someone who's done amazing work. In fact, sometimes it can be embarrassing winning when you look at what else was nominated. I've often thought, "I wouldn't have voted for me!" On the other hand, sometimes you lose to something that's a real stinker, and that can be galling (laughs). But over all the recognition from your peers is always nice. Of course, if you ask anyone later in the year who won a certain award, nobody will remember. We were racking our brains just a few weeks ago trying to remember what won the Oscar last year for Best Picture and couldn't think of it. So overall it's not terribly important, but it is always nice.
Murder Mysteries is being published as a 7"x10" hardcover books, featuring 64 full-color pages gorgeously illustrated by the Eisner Award-winning Russell. This book will be available for $13.95 beginning June 12.