AG: There are nine stories in this collection; how far back do they go?
PCR: They go from 1977 up to I think, 1997.
AG: So is that the very beginning of your career?
PCR: No, no. I started in '72 working with Dan Akins from Marvel Comics. Actually did three short stories for Marvel but they're you know, generic horror stories for their mystery magazines or horror magazines and don't amount to a wad of spit!
AG: Not worth collecting?
PCR: No, no. Only for the morbidly curious.
AG: Oh, I'm sure they're out there.
PCR: I mean aside from copyrights, I don't consider them, you know, "mine" quote/unquote. They were just assignments.
AG: Right, OK. So they were scripts by other people that you just illustrated?
PCR: Right, right.
AG: And in what venues did these appear?
PCR: Chamber of Chills and Journey into Mystery I think.
AG: Ah, I'm sorry. Not the very earliest ones. I mean those in Isolation and Illusions.
PCR: Those stories; all sorts of places. I did a series of books for Eclipse Comics from 1979 to the mid-eighties called Night Music and a number of them were featured in that. Two of the stories; "Breakdown on the Starship Remembrance" and "La Sonnambula", were originally published as a graphic album. It was the Eclipses' second publication and they were done in black and white. And then later reprinted in color, but they were designed for black and white so I'm happy we have the chance to show them that way. I think the way they're suppose to be seen in this collection.
AG: Right. So have any of these stories been revised? Or are you just letting them show up as they are?
PCR: There's actually there's a color revision. I'm really anxious, I'm really looking forward to seeing this. On "Gift of the Magi", which was done for a benefit book; Star Reach, a Marvel Comics benefit book. And it was either the first or second job that Lovern [Kindzierski, Russell's long-time colorist] colored my work. And we were still working out the kinks. The last page was the star over the city. It just came out in the original publication very flat. And later on, especially in Sandman #50 where I had all of these starscapes over Bagdad, he just, he just nailed those. Really figured out how to do it to give the silvery glow to the stars, so on this one he went back and redid that panel, that final sort of money shot. And I haven't seen it, it's on disk. But I'm sure, based on what he's done before, is going to be really nice.
AG: So when was the last time you had looked at all this material?
PCR: Oh, I see it frequently. I mean, I'm always looking at my own work to remind myself how I did something. I mean if I'm doing a starscape or a landscape, crashing ocean waves, or those sort of motifs that I've worked with, I'll look at what I've done before just to remind myself, to get a starting point. So I'm pretty much familiar with my own work.
AG: That's interesting. I've talked to a few artists who don't like to look at their "old" stuff.
PCR: It can sometimes be dispiriting. I mean, you always see the things you should have done or reworked and that could be better. But I try not to pay any attention to that.
AG: Right, right. I noticed that the "Voyage to the Moon" story seems to be drawn in a very different style than anything else I've ever seen from you. Was that just an experiment for that one story or...?
PCR: Well, sort of. It was a real break. It came, if you look at the numbers, it's what number 32 [of the Night Music series]? "The Gift of the Magi" is the one right before it and it's very illustrative; I worked with models and realism and lots of cross-hatching, and I just felt like I was sort of getting into a rut, that I was losing a "playful" feel that I sometimes had earlier in some of the Elric and Killraven pieces, mostly in the Elric pieces. And I was always sketching and doodling when I was on the phone and the faces and things I drew were nothing like my regular comics, so I just sort of came up with this look. At the same time, I came across this piece of writing and decided to use that look. To just draw everything out of my head with no reference material or research or study. And it was just a lot of fun and while I never quite went that far again, I think you'll notice in the later stories, stories after that. Like the Oscar Wilde Fairy Tales or Sandman, that there is a lot more cartoons, there's more cartooning elements in them then had been before.
AG: Right. When you first started in your career you were doing a lot of, you were doing a lot of creator-owned work but you were also doing a lot of work-for-hire stuff, you seem to have pulled away from the work-for-hire. Is it just because you can now or is it, is there another reason?
PCR: Well, let's see. When I very first started, the first like three or four years, it was all owned by the companies, mostly Marvel Comics. And that's just about the time, the mid to late 70's when the alternative or so called "ground level" comics as opposed to "main stream" comics were coming into their own, and I just had the opportunity to do some things that I wanted to do that the main stream companies just simply weren't interested in. You know, I didn't even think of taking it to them until Marvel's Epic magazine came along. And there was the chance to do some different sorts of things with that. Mostly through the '80s when I was doing this work for Eclipse, they didn't pay well, so the work-for-hire, mostly all of the inking jobs I did, was a way of making a living at the same time I was able to do my more personal work. So it was a trade off. And I'll still do that from time-to-time, I'm just getting ready to ink a series of Wonder Woman books.
AG: I noticed that you have a big presence on Lurid.com.
PCR: Yeah, that's home base.
AG: Oh, is it?
PCR: Yeah.
AG: OK. So I want to know what your relationship to technology is. Because it seems like most artists are either Luddites or Technophiles.
PCR: Um, I'm most definitely not a Luddite. But at the same time I'm a Technophobe. You know, I admire technology from a far, but I'm lucky in that the guy who owns and operates Lurid is a good friend of mine so he set up my computer. He's, you know, put in the programs I need and all I have to do is basically know how to type, so I can do the message board and talk to people. And he handles all the technological aspects of it. I can do e-mail and surf the web and that's about it.
AG: Right. So are you using computers at all in your artwork or is it still traditional?
PCR: No. It's all traditional. Of course I'm working with Lovern on the coloring and he uses a computer for a lot of color affects and things are done on the computer but I'm not doing any of that. I mean a Xerox machine is about as far I go technologically.
AG: Right. Do you find that you're able to communicate with Lovern when you're talking about things you'd like to see changed? Is there a barrier there?
PCR: Oh, no, not at all. We talk on the phone a lot when I send him the original artwork, you know, we go over what it is I'm looking for and trying, what affects I'm trying to get. And then he either sends me a set of proofs, like a rough draft or sometimes now, he sends me a jpeg that I look at. Which is what we were just doing before you called. We're working on the cover to isolation and Illusions. He had sent his first draft of it over today and I looked at on the computer, and it was like, you know, 95% there, there was just a couple little things I wanted to tweak and I asked him about it, he did it, sent it to me and that was fine, you know, so we go from there.
AG: OK. What kinds of things do you, are you seeing or reading in your, in you spare time. Like, not as research, but just?
PCR: You mean in comics?
AG: Not just in comics, overall.
PCR: Well good because I hardly read comics anymore. It's terrible.
AG: That's something I hear more and more often too, actually.
PCR: Yeah, I make a point of getting anything Mike Mignola does. And if Craig Hamilton has a new book out, I like his work a lot. You know, we just don't get Robert Crumb as a regular diet. And there are things that are out there but you have to put them under my nose before I become aware of them because I just don't go to the comic book store and follow things. So sometimes at conventions I pick up on things. Now outside of comics, I'm reading a lot of. I read a lot of non-fiction. I was just reading a Thomas Friedman's Attitudes and Latitudes (pause) Latitudes and Attitudes? [The book is Longitudes and Attitudes.] He's the mid-eastern correspondent for the New York Times. And his latest book is made up of his columns, about the first quarter of the book is before September 11th and then the rest of the book are all of his columns post-September 11th. And his insights into the mid-east, I mean he's been there for twenty years, are in-depth. And it's fascinating. And that's the kind of thing I'm more likely to be reading now.
AG: Right. How do find material to adapt?
PCR: Oh, I just stumble across it. I mean that "Voyage to the Moon" was a book I bought for ten cents at, I think, at a library sale. And it was called The World's Greatest Books, volume 20 or something. I mean just an old, old book and it had this excerpt of Voyage to the Moon. I sat down on the floor, I don't know why, I was just looking through my library and decided to look at that book and saw that and sat down and read it and walked right downstairs and started working on it that minute. And about three weeks later, I was finished with it. It doesn't happen like that very often, I mean, more often it's, I find something I want to do and then sometimes it's years before I get around to doing it. Or I'll do the layouts and script for it and it'll be years before then I find the time in my schedule, or I find a publisher that, you know, can back it.
AG: Right.
PCR: So it's nice when, those rare occasions when it happens spontaneously. But I do just sort of stumble across things. Either from, it happened the same way with my adaptation of the opera Palleas et Melisande, another book I bought from a library remainder sale for thirty-five cents. It had Maeterlinck's play in it that the opera came from and I'd always heard of Maeterlinck, so I decided to read it. A snowy winter day and I sat down on a stone wall coming back across campus and sat there in the middle of the nice, sunny, snowy January day and read all of Palleas et Melisande. And said, "I got to do this, it would make a great comic book."
AG: I'm glad you brought that up it's something I wanted to ask you about. You're probably the only cartoonist who looks at operas and thinks; "These would make great comics." What do you think that you're seeing in them that everyone else isn't? Because I think they do make great comics.
PCR: I think so too. Well, in so many of them, I think it fits at least with the kind of work I do, which is emotionally, right on the verge of over-the-top, you know. Its large gestures and -- that's not true of all opera, I mean Palleas et Melisande in its way, it's quintessentially French, well, Maeterlinck was Belgian. And it's very, very subtle and low-key, but still there's just something. And not all operas make good comics, I can tell you. It's not just on the basis of the music; it has to be a good story for it to translate. And a couple of them like Salome and Pelleas were originally plays before they were operas. Now I listened to the operas while I was working on them and the music influenced my adaptation of the play. So it relates to operas in that way. But with the Oscar Wilde, it's as much an adaptation of a play as it is an opera.
AG: Right. I was doing a Google search a couple days ago as research for this interview and your name came up in tandem with Neil Gainman's, a lot. Was Sandman the first work you had done with him?
PCR: Yes. Sandman #50.
AG: And since then you've adapted a couple of his short stories.
PCR: Right. One Life Furnished in Early Moorcock, which was published by Dark Horse in the Storm Bringer collection, well as a "one-shot" and then in the Stormbringer collection, and then Murder Mysteries for Dark Horse, and now I just finished a twenty-four page story that's going to be part of a Vertigo anthology about the Endless, I did Death. Actually it was a story that Neil had written for Moebius who had to back out, I think for health problems, at the last minute. And now he's doing a shorter piece in the book. So I've done four adaptations and then I wroye one that was adapted, that was drawn by somebody else. I did the script and layouts.
AG: Is there something about his stories that draw you to him?
PCR: Yes, they're very well written. And one of the reasons I've done adaptations so much over the years is, well, for one thing, I do like having that control over molding and shaping the piece. And I like it to be well written and I don't think that I'm that good a writer. But I think I do know how to take a piece that is already well written and take it apart and put it back together in another form. So that's one of the reasons I've done that and the other reason is that I wasn't being offered that many really interesting stories that I wanted to do by contemporary writers and comics. It tended to be main-stream, super hero stuff, which I just didn't find that interesting to read. And you know, if I was being handed fists full of scripts of the quality of Neil Gaiman's, I'd probably never to another adaptation. So I really enjoy the chance to work with a contemporary writer you know, that I can read and that I can show to my friends who don't read comics, and not have them read the lines out loud and laugh.
AG: So if you had unlimited opportunity and money, what kinds of "dream projects" would you be working on?
PCR: Well I've done the big "dream project." The Ring of the Nibelung. The rest I have, I have a couple more operas I want to do. I want to finish my cycle of Oscar Wilde Fairy Tales. And I would like to do a big book of Edgar Allan Poe. I've already done script and layouts for The Fall of the House of Usher. And I think it would be nice to do like a ninety, hundred page book of his stories and poems. That would be nice to do someday.
AG: So, I guess more concretely, what projects do you have coming up in the future?
PCR: I'm half way through my fourth volume of Oscar Wilde stories. Hopefully that will be out either Christmas or spring. And then I'm getting ready to do a Fables book for Vertigo. That I'm going to layout and ink, and it looks like Craig Hamilton will be penciling. We've been trying to get a project together for years, and it looks like this might be the one. And what I have in my drawer is the, you know, I have another, a forty-four page Oscar Wilde Fairy Tale. I have an opera; Cavalleria Rusticana, try to figure out how to spell that! And the House of Usher. Those three stories have been sitting there for several years, all layed out on the big pages and lettered and just waiting to go. I just have to find the time. I've had The Fisherman and His Soul done I think for eight years. Which is almost a record.
AG: Wow. Well, I believe that's everything I need unless there's something you'd like to mention or?
PCR: Ah, let's see. We didn't mention, we didn't talk about many of the other stories. I guess one of the things I thought was sort of interesting, the way Isolation and Illusions worked out, the structure of it, is that first story; "Dance on the Razor's Edge", based on the suicide death of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, begins the book and the last piece in the book, "Devil's" is from a short piece I did for Dark Horse's X, which was just a three page introductory story done as sort of a Persian fairytale, which is also a suicide, martyr piece. Which feels sort of creepily relevant right now and to have these two pieces as book ends gives a certain kind of structure to the whole book. Which was not actually intended but I realized that was going on after you know, Scott [Allie, Russell's editor on the book] came up with the list of the contents. And it works chronologically because it's the earliest and the latest and the most recent pieces.
AG: It's faith smiling down on you.
PCR: I guess so, yeah.
Isolation and Illusion, a 120-page trade paperback collecting many of P. Craig Russell's shorter works, will be available in comics shops January 2.