The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (40 page)
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Authors: Bev Vincent
A:Â Â Â I wasn't sure how well our styles would mesh at first, but when I saw what he did with the sample pages, I was blown away. And we never looked back. It became a symbiotic relationship.
Q:Â Â Â Do you do studies of characters or scenes before you attack what will become the final pages?
A:Â Â Â Yes. I do rough layouts for every page. I don't make them too tight, because that only leads to disappointment when I do the finished pencils because the tight pencils will never have the same energy or flow the sketches had and that can be infuriating.
Q:Â Â Â Do you prefer working on established characters or do you like to introduce new ones?
A:Â Â Â I preferred working on characters that I could use descriptions to guide me. If the character isn't described in detail, there's more responsibility on my shoulders and that can get scary.
Q:Â Â Â How long does it take to create a typical issue?
A:Â Â Â It varies tremendously. I would love to say I can do a book in thirty days, but I'd be lying.
Q:Â Â Â How much back-and-forth was there among you and your collaborators?
A:Â Â Â We all wanted to be faithful to the source material, so we were all open to suggestions. We just wanted to do the best we could.
Q:Â Â Â Do you have a favorite panel or sequence from your work on the series?
A:Â Â Â I'd have to say the fight sequence between Roland and Cort in the first issue of Gunslinger Born.
Q:Â Â Â Is it different illustrating a novel?
A:Â Â Â The stuff I did for Marvel was a comic book. This is very different. This is a novel accompanied by a number of full-page illustrations. Some are in color, some in black-and-white. I think close to twenty images. I did the cover as well. All the line art is hand drawn and the coloring was beautifully rendered by my wife, June Chung, digitally. Few things I've worked on are as cool as doing the illustrations for
The Wind Through the Keyhole
.
R
ICHARD
I
SANOVE
Richard Isanove colored every issue of the Marvel graphic novel adaptations, providing a consistent look and feel to the series over its nearly six-year publication run. He was also the sole illustrator for the Fall of Gilead series,
The Sorcerer
and Sheemie's Tale.
Isanove is originally from Bordeaux, France, where he was introduced to American comic books. When he was eleven, he told his school class that he wanted to be either a comic book artist for Marvel or an astronaut. Both of these professions seemed equally unlikely for a kid growing up in France.
He attended Ãcole Nationale Supèrieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris for five years, where he studied fine arts geared toward animation. Because he spoke English (his mother is British), he was able to get a post as an exchange student at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles in 1994, where he also studied animation.
When San Diegoâbased comic book studio Homage opened Top Cow in LA, Isanoveâa longtime comic book fanâapplied for a job, though he was still in school. He was hired based on his paintings and was introduced to the world of computer coloring. After Top Cow, he received an offer to work on Daredevil for Marvel. It was his childhood dream come true.
He met his wifeâwho works in animation as an editorâand has remained in the United States ever since, although his wife's job has moved them around a lot over the past four years, including a year back in Bordeaux. He has done over five hundred covers for Marvel, including work on just about every title and character. He has done major series of Spider-Man, Wolverine and the X-Men. He started developing a computer painting technique
that went beyond simple coloring, where he worked directly from pencils instead of inked art while working on Wolverine Origins in 2001.
The following interview was conducted via telephone in November 2011.
Q:Â Â Â Was it a big transition to move from animation into comics?
A:Â Â Â Not really. Both deal with storytelling. We do what animators do in layouts or storyboards. Animation is the more tedious part of it. Doing the storyboards and figuring out how to tell the story was always my favorite part. The biggest challenge and the most interesting part. When I drew some episodes of Dark Tower, it was always the most exciting part. There's about a week of just doing layouts and sketches, figuring out how to tell the story in pictures. After that, it's almost a routine. It's still interesting, but the most stimulating part is doing the storytelling. And that's common to both animation and comics.
Q:Â Â Â Because of the way the Dark Tower is being created, you actually have more creative input into the layout than a traditional comic because Robin Furth is just providing outlines.
A:Â Â Â It reads almost like a short story. It says
SCENE ONE
and then it's a few paragraphs of describing what happens in the scene with bits of dialogue, but it's more prose than a scenario. It's really great. It would be harder now to work any other way because it's so cool. She's very open to suggestion. We're working on the one-shot right now about Sheemie. I'm able to negotiate with her to get things I want to draw. We shape the story together. Often, also, to put everything she puts in would take forty-eight pages and we only have twenty-two to twenty-eight. You're allowed to do the cuts yourself, but I like to go back and forth with her until we are both happy with what there is. There's been a lot of back-and-forth and deciding what we keep and what to cut out and how to tell that thing more efficiently, or what would be more interesting visually, and then she just rewrites it until we're both happy with it. It's a very satisfying work process. She's so easygoing and very enthusiastic about everything.
Q:Â Â Â Were you familiar with Stephen King's work when you were asked to work on the Dark Tower series?
A:Â Â Â I used to date a girl in college who was a huge Stephen King fan and she always wanted me to read
The Gunslinger
. She was such a
fan of it, I frowned on it just to bust her chops. I started listening to books on tape when I was working on X-Men and Daredevil. That's when I listened to my first Stephen King. It was
Bag of Bones
, and he read it himself. I was looking for books that authors read themselves. I thought it was really cool. I loved it, and ever since, probably at least a third of the books I've listened to on tape were Stephen King's.
Q:Â Â Â How did you react when you were offered the chance to work on a project with Stephen King?
A:Â Â Â After Wolverine Origins, I thought, okay, that was my Mount Everest. There was so much publicity about it and it was such a big seller that I didn't know how to top it. Then I got Neil Gaiman's
1602
and I said, okay, cool, I get to work with Neil Gaiman. How was I going to top that? The next thing I know I'm working with Stephen King. I don't know what else. Maybe I'm going to get the new Bible to illustrate or something.
Joe Quesada knew I was a big Stephen King fan. I had already talked about it with him. Once I said, “Why don't you guys get Stephen King to write something for you?” At the time that's when Stephen King had decided to retire. So they thought, it's not going to happen. Then Quesada called me back a few years later. “You're a big fan of Stephen King, aren't you? What do you say about coloring a few pages by next week?”
Q:Â Â Â Short notice for a very important presentation.
A:Â Â Â Yeah. They called me on Tuesday and the next Wednesday King was supposed to come in. Jae started drawing the pages. They started coming in on Friday, I think. It was supposed to be three pages. Then it became four pages. Then it was four pages and a cover. It just kept adding up.
King was coming to the Marvel office on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. Since I'm on the West Coast, it was six in the morning for me. They had to put the whole presentation together before, and they wanted to print it out on big boards with a fake “The Dark Tower” to pretend they were doing a whole cover. We were just cranking, and it turned out that Jae finished the cover on Tuesday night. I was still coloring the pages. He sent it in, and I had too many windows open and my computer crashed just as I was
uploading the last cover. I had just finished that huge background of the double-page spread on pages three and four. Because of the way it crashed, I was able to recover the file. It was a miracle. I had worked for four to six hours on that background. It was this massive thing of clouds. I was trying to show off. I was like, okay, what do I do good? Clouds! Clouds and sunset and all that. And it worked, because I guess in that first interview Stephen King was saying that when he saw the purples and all that, that's when he was sold.
It was really cool because Jae was a big fan of the books, too. I'd read pretty much everything I could get my hands on except the Dark Tower. Since it started to seep into the other books, I knew I had to sit down and listen to it. There's a copy of
The Gunslinger
that King had recorded, but I had the one recorded by Frank Muller. I had tried a couple of times and I just couldn't get into it. The tone is so different from everything else he does. It was not what I wanted in a Stephen King book. When I started working on it, of course, I played it through. And, actually,
The Drawing of the Three
is probably my all-time favorite of his books. Once I got into it, I kind of enjoyed the first one, but the second one, I was so excited about it. I really loved it.
I like that you can connect to his characters right away. Within a couple of pages, you feel you understand the characters because they're always bright, or people that you can relate to because they always do the right thing but still things are bigger than them. It's not like in horror movies. People jump out just as the monster is coming. No, his characters stay hidden, but they still get fucked. They react like you would. Especially in
Bag of Bones
. All the feelings that he was tapping into are so realistic that within a few pages I was totally engrossed in the book.
And that's usually how it works. But in the Dark Tower, since it's also told in such a descriptive way, it takes a while to get into it. The tone is almost grandiloquent. I listened to it twice from beginning to end and bits and pieces, depending on what we were working on. I wanted to refresh my memory on the scenes. The second time I listened to
The Gunslinger,
I enjoyed it greatly because now I knew who Roland was and I was just happy to be with him again. That's the thing: there's not much character development in it. You discover him through the story. But once you know the character,
you enjoy
The Gunslinger
much more. In the Tull story, he's kind of a jerk. He really grows as the book goes. Even in
The Drawing of the Three,
he's still kind of there, but because he is weakened physically, you relate to him. I think it really was a stroke of genius; cutting his fingers off at the beginning of the story just suddenly made him human when he was this archetypal jerk, a guy that guns down people just because he doesn't like them. As it went, suddenly he became more human and from then on you cared about him. As soon as he gets wounded, suddenly the whole paradigm changes on him and it really becomes very engrossing.
Q:Â Â Â Without the inking step, how is the pencil art conserved when you paint it digitally?
A:Â Â Â The line is still there. That's why I like to work from pencilsâthe frailty of the line shows more. When you look at a painting, even at a Frazetta, sometimes you can still see the line appearing through the paint. That's what I'm trying to doâhave the color cover everything but still have the line show through. I put a color in the line art so it becomes one with the color instead of being a layer of black with a layer of color underneath. I'm trying to reblend the two as if it was in the painting. Use the line art as a contrast element, not just as an incisive line. It's not just there to separate the red from the blue. There's going to be a little bit of purple in it so the two colors blend within the line art. It's a darker value of the color, but it's usually not totally different. It's part of the color vocabulary.
With Jae, the work we did at the beginning was to integrate the blacks, because he likes to use big black areas. I started to put that splatter into it. I use a lot of toothbrush splatters. I have five different patterns and densities of toothbrush patterns that I scanned that I reuse. Then I fill with color and I superimpose them to get different densities. That allows me to integrate the line art into the color, because color is put into the line art.
Q:Â Â Â Is this a process that would only work with a computer?
A:Â Â Â When I used to paint, I always liked using a toothbrush. It's a great finishing instrument. It gives a grittiness to the page. It gives textures and makes it a little bit more interesting. I used something similar on Wolverine Origins, but I was using a canvas texture. I
scanned a canvas where I did some rough gray-scale painting on it. I used that texture to have two layers of color. When you look at a canvas painting, you put on a first coat of paint and then, if you go with a drier brush, you're going to have the full color; and then, as there is less paint on the brush, only the top layer of the canvas is going to be affected, so the grooves keep the original color and the second layer of color only appears on the upper layer of the canvas. It creates a pattern and that's an easy way to blend colors. I always thought that was a very interesting way to have two different values, two different colors, appearing at the same time, like a screen painting. That's what I was trying to do with the splatters because Jae said he didn't want me to use that effect.
On
1602
I did it by using etchings, because in the drawing he did all of these little etchings at forty-five degrees, so I tried to mimic that with the color, so the whole book is just made with forty-five-degree etchings of different colors. It seems almost impressionist. By putting two colors next to each other, you get a third color. Instead of mixing them, I would have a green and a slightly bluer green and you come up with an interesting aqua with lots of textures to it. That's what I'm trying to attain there. Jae wanted something different on
The Dark Tower
. He didn't like the canvas, and I was fed up with the etchings. I wanted to do something else anyway. I always used splatter as a finishing tool and I said, how about making that the main thing? Since the world is coming to an end, that will give this impression of having dust in the air all the time. Pretty much it's like colored dust all over the whole book. I liked the idea from the Ridley Scott movie
Legend
, with Tom Cruise. There's always dust in the air in that movie. There are always particles floating around the characters to create depth. You could actually feel the light. I thought it was a perfect vehicle to explore that, to have this impression of thick air. No matter where you go, you've got this dust that's defining the space.