Interview; Brandon Graham

I discovered Brandon Graham's work in a way I think that Brandon would appreciate; I randomly came across his book Multiple Warheads on the stand and bought it on a whim. Multiple Warheads was a book that was a pleasant shock for me and I was sold on Brandon's work ever since. His book King City (left), which originally came out through Tokyopop and is now about to complete it's run through Image Comics, is easily one of the best books of the last 5 years to come out from a major direct market publisher. Brandon's comics are easily some of the most beautiful to look at, are full of humor, and yet very personal. Brandon also has one of the best blogs about comics where he talks about artists he's currently enjoying or found, his process, and talks about the comics and books he picks up. Brandon was generous enough to volunteer some of his time to give this interview.

Brandon Graham's blog can be found at http://royalboiler.livejournal.com/. Please be warned some images he posts are not safe for work.

Comics Connections: Can you talk a little about yourself and the books that you've done?

Brandon Graham: Sure, I grew up with parents that were both deep into science fiction and an older brother that's an artist so I got the idea in my head that all I would ever want to do was make comic books when I was really young. It was before I can remember, my mom tells me I announced to her that I was going to be a comic artist when I was 7. I like to joke that I didn't really have all the facts then to be making life plans like that--but it seems to have worked out.

I've been drawing comics all my life now and it's become my therapy and entertainment.

Most recently I did King city, about a guy who has a cat that can become any tool or weapon--that's coming out through Image comics monthly, the 12th and last issue comes

out next month. Right now I'm working on a Russian werewolf fantasy comic called Multiple warheads.

CC: Can you talk a little about your experience as a comics reader? Your tastes are really far reaching and pretty catholic, so I'm wondering how that developed

Graham: My older brother Keith, brought a lot of it home. He was into a lot of european and small press comics and he would dig up tons of interesting books he brought home a shonen jump for me from a japanese grocery store I was around 12 or 13, that was a huge deal to me.

When he was away at college I had been suspended and later dropped out of school, I spent a lot of time going through all his boxes of books.

So i was just left alone with all these fantastic books.

CC: What kind of artistic training have you had?

Graham: My older brother nudged me in the right direction I remember him teaching me how to draw feet from the front and I've got some friends that have taught me a lot about drawing and I read a lot on it. No schooling on art though, I had a hard time with school early on and never equated it with drawing.

I've since seen some great teaching on art so I'm certainly not opposed to it

World building
CC: One of the things that I really love about your work Brandon are the environments and world building that is very much apart of your work. How much of them are influenced by the cities that you've lived in throughout your life?

Graham: Thanks.

A lot of it is pretty direct, even if I'm trying to do it as a joke with people getting stabbed in the background A lot of that is me trying to show how living in a city can feel some days. Also I like to try to relate the stuff I draw to real places that I've been. And at the same time a lot of it can be pretty escapist or just what I think is funny or cool at the time.

CC: What sort of things inspire you when you're doing world building?

Graham:I really get excited by the idea that everything in a comic can have a history and a story.

So even in drawing a room I can keep myself entertained by thinking of what each tool and area of the room is used for.

Sometimes I like to write through the reference, I'll get a stack of cool photos that I would like to take ideas from and try to come up with a story that can connect them.

CC: Can you talk a little bit about the process involved in constructing the worlds. How long and involved is it?

Graham: A lot of it is just done as I go, I like the idea of drawing whatever I'm in the mood to draw but I also set a lot of rules for what should and shouldn't go in a city. A lot of putting together a feel for a comic for me seems to be setting rules to follow so everything gels. Like there's no guns in king city or in multiple warheads how everything has to pass through this fake history I've made up.--It's really vague and mostly based off what little I know of chinese history mixed with monsters and magic.

CC: How much research do you do or how little?

Graham: I'll look things up as I work. One of the things i like best in making comics is that you can go where your interests are, so I'll read something because i'm interested and then come up with ideas for my own stuff while just looking to be entertained. Also I like that it forces you to learn more about things you're interested in--like if you like submarines and want to put one in a comic, you'll have to learn more about submarines just to get it right.

CC: How thought out are your worlds? Do you put a lot of thought and back story that we the reader don't see or is a lot of it off the cuff?

Graham: There's always lots of ideas that don't make it into the comics. in king city there's a character Beebay, who's like the femme fatal and I did around 200 pages without mentioning her name. So there's a lot of details like that and then there'll be things that have nothing to do with the main characters

that will just be an idea I want to have fun with.

CC: What kind of things do you think are important to do when creating a world?

Graham: Seems important to regard how the characters inside a story would regard their environment or not regard their environment. Like if you show someone who grew up in a town with talking dragons he's not going to freak out when he sees one. Something that I try for is just having characters that are along for the ride, I get frustrated reading books where they have to spend 10 pages convincing a character of the world they live in -- Where someone willl say something like, "wait you are telling me talking dragons are real? I don't believe you!" ---because the reader doesn't need to be convinced if they're reading a comic called Talking dragons that there would be talking dragons in it. If anything I think it'd be worse if there weren't.

That reminds me of a time that me and a friend rented the movie vampires vs zombies and there weren't anything I could identify as vampires or zombies in the movie, afterwards we watched a thing called Haunted bunker that wasn't very good either but it felt like a huge success because it at least had a bunker that was haunted.

Craft
CC: What tools do you use when you're making comics?

Graham: I pencil with mechanical pencil and any eraser. I like the ones that look like white cubes.
Micron Pigma pens #3 and #5 for inking
(5 for lettering also)
I have a refillable brush pen with a cap that I dip in a bottle of ink to fill in big chunks of black.

And then I scan the 11 by 17 pages into photoshop and color or grayscale them.

CC: Can you talk a little about your working process? How much planning goes into your pages from beginning to end?

Graham: I start with an idea of what i want to have in a scene or page and then try to hammer it into something good. I do a lot of really rough layouts and write and rewrite a lot in the layouts. But it can be different for each page sometimes I just jump in.

Brandon Graham works through a panel from King City from roughs to finish

Lately I've really been getting back into lettering everything by hand on the page. I like the spontaneity that you can get in comics. I like that sometimes I have to add or take words away just to make the baloon fit or look right on a page.

CC: A lot of people I know when we talk about your comics is how detailed everything is. However, one thing that really strikes me is your use of negative space, people being dwarfed by large cities and environments. What's the thinking behind this?

Graham:I feel like detail is worth more when you also show empty space. It's like how food tastes better when you're hungry.

yin and yang dawg.

CC: Your work has a variety of influences. How hard was it as an artist to boil those down into your own voice and is a continuing process?

Graham: Style seems to me like a manifestation of taste, so it seems weird that any artist would have the exact same taste and background as another person.

I really need the influences, a lot of what i do feels like call and response. I'll see something that I like and want to do my version or notice something I think looks good and try to

throw it in my stuff. And there's all these ideas I have on art that mess with how something is drawn--When I was a teenager I decided that circles look futuristic so if I want something

to look space age I'll put circles on it.

CC: You've mentioned in a few places that graffiti had a big impact on you when you were younger. How important do you think it is to have influences outside comics?

Graham: There's defiantly a lot of great work out there that isn't comics. It seems important to check out the rest of the world just as a human being. Comics is pretty new the best art and writing humanity has made isn't always found there.

Graffiti was really important to me initially because I wanted to interact with other artist and as much as I loved comics there wasn't any scene I knew or could relate to at the time in Seattle. I learned a lot from it. Especially on how to have snarkey fun with art and treat it as a culture and not a job.

CC: Occasionally you do things in your comics that play with formal aspects that play with the medium. What inspires these sorts of tricks and are they driven by the story or driven by a desire to just tinker with the comics medium?

Graham: It's pretty exciting to me how much can be done with words and pictures, it seems amazingly untapped. When i was a teenager I was reading all these great Matt Howarth comics (left) where he would have time travel comics you could cut out into moebius strips and subliminal printed on the backs of pages you could read if you held the book up top the light.

I feel like it'd be hard to make comics without those sorts of thing once you'd seen them.

CC: You write alot about comics on your blog and I'm curious how important you think it is to be able to express your ideas about the medium?

Graham: I really love the medium but I dislike a lot of what the comic book industry is. A lot of it for me is trying to carve my own feelings about what I do.

CC: Your next Multiple Warheads book will be published in color but your previous work has been in black and white (image from the first Mulitple Warheads book on right and image from the upcoming color issue on the left). What sort of decisions do you have to make about your work in color versus your work in black and white?

Graham: Oh yeah it's a different animal. On the same kick as what i was saying about playing with the medium, it opens up a lot to have color. also just the way i draw for color is different.

Something about having to think about what color everything will be while you draw it, ive noticed that trying to color something i didnt intend for color while drawing it is really hard.

Print
CC: You've been published in a variety of print sizes from the manga trade format to the large size that King City is being published in through Image. Does the size that you're going to be printed at influence what choices you make when you're drawing?

Graham: yeah definatly, when i started King city I was planning it to be comic size and then about 40 pages in i found out it'd be manga size so i started making less panels on a page, and as soon as I got back to issues I think the pages got denser again. Also the format changes how I put comics together, I want to make something that has enough meat in it to stand by itself.

CC: Since your next book is in color, are there decisions and considerations that you have to make now that you haven't had to previously when putting a out a book?

Graham: The thing that's been weighing on me is if I'm using the color enough to my advantage. There's been a couple things so far that I'm happy with, I have a cup in the story that changes water different colors depending on what is in it. red --for radiation--blue if it's haunted ect. but the door is open there's a lot of options.

CC: What kind of advice can you give to any cartoonists just starting out?

Graham: One thing that I like to think about is how you really have to make the art your own, forget that there's anyone else seeing it and draw the stuff you want to read. treat this like self expression rather than a job.