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The Austin English Interview (page three of three)
Colonia
Now I want to talk a little bit about Colonia, which is basically what the interview is about. You don't really see any pirate comics anymore. Why do you think that is? The only pirate comic I've seen other then this, is the story in Watchmen, which I think a letter writer commented on.
Yeah. I don't know why that is. Someone…I think there is one book, I have to check it out, called Blood Thirsty Pirate Tales, which is going around, but I don't know if it's a series, or really gory or anything. But I was just thinking about that today. Actually I'm working on the third issue, and I'm working on a sequence that I thought of when I first thought of Colonia. Sometimes there are scenes that I thought of when I thought of the premise, that I won't even get to for a while. So here's one that's of a boarding party, and the two ships are going at one another, and the gist of it is, that Jack sleeps through it, or he sleeps in when this is going on, and what's unique about it is, it's all told in pantomime, there's no dialogue, no sound effects. So it was really a challenge, because every panel had to tell a story and there's also no lettering to obliterate part of the panels, so there's a lot more illustration going on, too. It's taking a lot of time.
Yeah. I'm a big fan of silent comics, because I never like the look of balloons interfering with the illustration work.
So, I think I'm on page four, slow going, but basically, the sun rises, and, they're coming up on the ship, and then it all goes into smaller panels, and it's just in pantomime. And even here, y'know, he's ringing the bell, but there's no "clang, clang, clang" because the more I thought about it…if I started putting in "clang, clang, clang," then I have to put in every sound effect. And I don't want all this "pow pow" "zing, boom."
Yeah, well there are all these weird nuances of comics. So, when you do something like this, the reader has to pay attention. They can't skim it, they have to really read the panels.
Yeah. So, it's a lot more engaging for the reader. And so here's Jack, still asleep, and that's about as far as I've gotten. So, to get back to your question, when I was looking at this yesterday, this sequence goes on for eight pages. And I was thinking, y'know it's probably been thirty years since somebody has done an eight page pirate battle sequence in a comic book in America. Or more! I mean I don't know. (Laughs).
Well, definitely more then thirty years since one that's actually been published and seen daylight.
Well, that was definitely a kick, and it made me think, "Wow, I'm really doing something different here." (Laughs).
Well, there's so many comic types within the mainstream, besides superheroes, like crime and sci-fi, but it seems to ignore pirate comics, and I don't understand that, because in other media, they're relatively successful.
Right. And they're like a whole mythology in our culture that people still really identify with I think.
Sea life is such an interesting thing to do a story on…
And sea mythology. There's gonna be a lot of that. There's so much, in the series, and it's not even into that yet. It's gonna be a blast.
Already, there's lots of characters in Colonia, that are kind of like new world folklore. When did you decide to incorporate that element into Colonia? Or did it just seem like a natural thing to do?
I think it all started at the same time. Actually, it started as a desire to do fantasy. I'm not really attracted to the medieval fantasy, and I wouldn't want to draw kings, queens and castles, and trolls and all that, and as soon as I thought of placing it in the new world, that's when I knew "Yeah! That's what I want to do." So I started thinking about, oh I don't know, Ponce De Leon, Paul Bunyon, and who knows…Rip Van Winkle I think is one of them I thought about, Headless Horseman, all that stuff.
Well, what struck me about the folklore within Colonia, is that it's less well known than Paul Bunyon, so when you read it, there really is more of a sense of discovery and surprise. Whereas, if you put Paul Bunyon in there…it's less new.
Yeah. I definitely use the more obscure of the legends.
Again, in the Father and Son Special, you talk about losing interest in comics, and then having that interest rejuvenated. Is that rejuvenation still carrying off into Colonia?
Oh, Colonia really was the reason for the rejuvenation, because I had actually, I had thought of Colonia before I did the Father and Son Special, and so, that's why to me when I look at the Father and Son Special, I can see all the oomph in there, where I got the excitement back. And some people have commented on it, but if you notice, the figure drawing is far beyond the old Kitchen Sink issues of Father and Son. I really started caring about the drawing…
Well, Father and Son, is not my favorite thing but…(Colonia) is a lot more detailed with the background, and all the research that goes into it. I mean comparing it to TTH, there's so much more inking and detail. In the first issue of Colonia, you introduced so many whimsical characters and there's so much going on, but at the same time, it doesn't take itself too seriously. Do you think comics have kind of gotten away from the whole whimsical light hearted thing, because I know those are the kinda comics you like, because you like Castle Waiting, and all that good stuff.
Yeah. I think comics do take themselves too seriously, and I really wanted to step far away from that. At least in the early issues of Colonia. Later on, there will be some subjects that are a little weightier, like Bone for example: I really love Bone, and it's a lot of fun, but early on, after the first couple of issues, the big hooded character shows up and says, "We must find the one with the star on his chest!" And it's the old cliché.
There's just a scene in here where Jack is talking to a talking bird, and there's no real explanation, and he just says "Hey! You're a talking bird!" and then they just carry on the conversation. And there doesn't need to be an explanation. Letting it unravel in your mind is so much more appropriate.
And maybe they would do that in real life. I mean, if you were alone and a duck talked to you… I wouldn't run away. I would probably talk to it. If it had a personality, you wouldn't just dismiss it, you would converse with it.
And with scenes like that, Colonia can really be presented to younger kids, but it's not…it's not dumbed down. I mean, that's something really hard to do…to be able to do a story that appeals to everybody, and not dumb it down. How do you do that? Is it even conscious?
It's not a conscious effort at all. Most of Colonia is written almost kind of subconsciously, which I'm really enjoying. When you asked about Habitrails, and if there was the same kind of joy -- there wasn't. Habitrails was sitting at the typewriter going, "How am I going to tell a story about all this bad stuff."
Sometimes it's a lot harder to tell a story, where, you know what happens.
And Colonia is not sitting at a typewriter, it's just waiting for the stories to come and get me. It sounds funny but it's really true. Most of them I've come up with while I've been out hiking, and I just let it all go in the back of my mind, and every once in a while, a story will just come along and show up. And that's the way I've been doing it. I've got the fifth issue completely written in my head and partly on paper. Five issues worth have all just come forth, rather then me having to go get them.
How hard is it managing a book with as many characters as Colonia has? Because as you're doing the story, you have to know where everyone is and not forget about them.
That's been real easy and natural with this series. That's working out the same way as the plotting goes. They're (the characters) pretty much writing themselves. To me it's sort of a person in my head, and as soon as you decide to put two of them together, they just start creating their own dialogue, without me having to come up with it.
Well that's a sign of really well developed characters if you know them so well.
Yeah. I enjoy that so much. Another scene that I thought of when I first thought of the series is in the fourth issue, which I've already written out, is when the pirates are having interaction between he two uncles and Cinnabar…but when they're just relaxed…and, what would they talk about? It's pretty interesting.
I liked the interaction between them in the second issue though.
Oh, the adversarial contact. So yeah, your comment about all the different characters will become even more interesting when they all come together. Because now, they're all scattered around, but ultimately were gonna have Jack and his uncles, Cinnabar, and Captain Reed, Lucy, y'know everybody is all gonna be interacting together.
A lot of the times, having a huge cast can be helpful, because if you focus on just one character, his beliefs and character traits may limit you from telling different kinds of stories, but if you have a huge cast, you can tell those kind of stories. Obviously, lot's of research goes into Colonia. Could you talk a little about this process? Does a lot of it come by chance?
I have been seeking it out, going to bookstores, hunting for it, and then there's some luck when something will come up on TV, and I'll tape it…in fact I have two or three tapes, where, I don't know how I would have done this without those tapes. They're pirate documentaries, they're just invaluable. Well, here I am on the third issue, and you think I could draw a pirate ship by now, out of my head, but for some reason looking at a ship while your drawing it and drawing it out of your head, it's so different. So, even if you know the whole structure in your head and you can draw a blueprint of the ship, you can't quite get the feeling of the ship, without seeing one. So I'm still looking at reference all the time, which makes things more interesting, because I drew everything out of my head for years, and that gets kind of boring.
So yeah, I go to bookstores, and hunt for good stuff. And you can find reference really cheaply. You can just find some stupid old book about ships from the seventies, and it's two dollars, and it's got killer pictures and, y'know, (laughs), and it's got wharves or whatever you need in it.
Colonia is a really funny book, but I don't think humor is it's driving force. When your writing a story, or when your drawing a story, how do you keep it so that the humorous parts won't really overpower the book? Or it doesn't take over?
That's a good question. I don't know if I've ever thought about that.
I mean, going back to a book like Bone, some of the issues will be too dark, and then some of them will be…where he's trying to put a joke into every panel. Sometimes, that just doesn't work.
I think the answer there, is that I let the humor just come out when it's natural and I never say, "I need a joke here." It's like real life. It's like when you joke around with people that you work with, the jokes just come, they just arrive, you don't say, "I'm gonna have a funny day now!"
And the least funny person in the group is always the person who's trying really hard to make a joke.
The joker! "I'm the funny guy!" Right. So, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, I hadn't thought about that. The humor is just there when it…when it's natural. And…I really, really avoid anything being corny.
Well, the humor in here isn't sit-com kind of humor, or corny kind of humor.
It's situational humor. Or it's just a drawing like…like to me, one of the funniest kind of things is (flips to scene in Colonia #1) when Jack says "What is this? This looks like a weed." When he's looking at a peanut plant. And Lucy's looking at it too, and she has this kind of look that says "Ohh, I'm so proud!" (Laughs). This little face that…and then (points to panel where Jack uproots the peanut plant, showing that it's not a weed), she's all, "See, see, I told ya!" (Laughs).
This is something I mentioned earlier, but the color covers on Colonia are really beautiful. And I think that the cover adds a lot to that. So, my question is, do you think that black and white limits you at all.
No, because that's what I'm so used to. It would be hard to imagine working on the interiors, thinking of them as being in color, just because that's so much work. I used to do color for DC (by way of Medley Studios). I colored comics for a living for a while. Green Lantern, Batman Adventures . . . Batman Adventures was the one that was made to look like the cartoon, so the color struck you more on that one, because we had to use real flat colors. But it's a lot of work, it's the difference between a cover, which is one design, one palette, whereas in the book, you've gotta juggle all the panels that need to be colored in a certain way, and then all in harmony, and phew, it's just a lot of work. Linda Medley taught me the ropes.
I'm really happy with black and white interiors and color covers. I just think it works. I mean like Cerebus, I couldn't imagine that in color. But then the covers, I couldn't imagine them in black and white. I think it really works.
That explains a lot, that you did coloring before, because when I looked at the cover of Colonia #1, I had never seen you work in color before, and just all the work that went into it was great. The concept of Colonia, a present day young boy, is thrust into a reality where it's still 1999, but pirates still exist, the new World is called Colonia, and much of the new World is uncharted, seems like a pretty commercially successful idea. But the way you execute it, it becomes something beyond the idea, and a whole wonderful universe is created. Could you talk a little bit about fleshing the basic idea of Colonia out? Or was the initial concept what you used to anchor all of these ideas you had been having?
I think I first thought of the concept of fantasy in the New World, and that's when I knew, this is something I want to think about, and daydream about. And then, when I created Adarro the fish man (a character with fish that pose as a human being, sort of), I knew, "Now I'm starting…now I'm starting this book because of this guy." (Laughs). His first appearance is a very important moment in the first issue. So that's when it went from concept to living, breathing characters, that just have to…have to be drawn now. Have to start talking.
In that sense, the possibilities of Colonia seem really limitless. Do you think coming up with all these ideas is kind of a reaction to the other work you've done like TTH and Father and Son? They were really limited in their concepts…and Colonia is…you can do anything with it.
Someone compared Colonia being more like Ultra Klutz, then anything I've done…and I think he was right. Ultra Klutz was really open ended too, and anything could happen, which is probably why it went on for 31 issues. I really enjoyed that. Colonia is gonna go on as long as it entertains me and, hopefully, other people.
Colonia feels a bit like Castle Waiting, and you've worked for Linda Medley. Do you want to comment a little on her work and her hiatus?
I don't know much about her hiatus. She's working for Vertigo…on Books of Faire I think. I haven't talked to her personally about it. Her work was one of the biggest influences on Colonia. Her work, and Jeff Smith's work on Bone. I would have to say, that if I had never met Linda Medley, Colonia would not exist.
So she's really a direct influence.
Both as an artist, and as a self-publisher.
Well, Colonia feels like a lot of stuff that's on the Trilogy Tour . . . and it's not in the Fantagraphics area . . . but it does really feel like a movement in comics. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why is this happening now?
It definitely is, at least as a spontaneous…how do I say it. It has a lot to do with Bone. Bone showed people that you can do something really fun, and it can be successful. So, I think that's led to a lot of the books that seem to be part of a movement.
But Bone is so different because it's got these characters that can be really commercially successful, that can be marketable, whereas Castle Waiting and Colonia, they're really different in that sense.
They are. Castle Waiting and Colonia I think are more the kind of books that you want to get inside. You want to go curl up and live in there. You don't want to play with action figures of some of these characters, you want to pretend you are there. That's how I see it.
Will you stop working on Colonia, when it stops being as fun as it is now?
My wish is to only draw this book from now until it's finished, and as for as how far it will go I don't know. I've written the first five. I then I kinda stopped myself because, I want them to be fresh, so, I don't want to just keep plotting stories up to 11, 12, when I can't work on them till the year 2010. That's frustrating. So I kind of stopped day dreaming about it. And at some point I'll start again, and it'll all just come jumping out.
It must have been hard to actually stop day dreaming about.
Oh yeah. And I stopped reading books about folklore, and so forth, and I just don't look at them because I can't handle having too much of this in my head. It takes, just so long to draw. But to give you an idea of where it's going, I'm kind of following the history of Western culture, through the New World, and that's why I start with a lot of Columbus reference, and it goes into the Spanish, and I'm gonna wind up in Florida. And were gonna walk through the whole East Coast, and we're eventually gonna go to the West.
So, soon it's gonna stop being a sea story?
Yeah.
In a way, it's a confusing story, because it's the same year (as now), but yet we're back to where The Americas haven't really been charted and they're still being discovered. Where did this idea come to you?
This was part of my answer to agonizing over "how do I do fantasies and the New World?" I didn't want it to be a specific real period in history. And people can get away with that when they're doing Medieval fantasies. They cannot reference the year, you can just imagine, its probably the year 900 or something, who cares? But in the New World, there's such specific progression of events, and western powers coming over and dominating certain areas, that you can't pretend that it's not a specific year. Y'know in history, if the Spanish are here, and the French are here, it's gotta be this time in history. And I didn't want that. I didn't want to be limited by history.
So, not only did I want the fantasy characters, but I wanted that open-ended sort of playground in the New World, and my answer to that was an alternative history. And not that many people have tried to figure this out yet, which is good, because I really want…down the road, people are gonna look back at Colonia 1, 2, 3, 4 as just the really simple fun issues that don't start getting into what's happened to history because it's so complex and I've spent a lot of time reading history and I have an alternative history completely worked out. As far as what has happened to Europe, what's happened with religion, there's a lot of issues that you really have to work out.
So beyond being just a lighthearted story, it is gonna delve into other issues.
Yeah. It's gonna be…I don't wanna say it's gonna be more adult, but it's just gonna be weightier, I think is the best way to describe it.
Well there's one scene where Jack says, "I just like history," and I kinda gathered that was you speaking through him.
Oh yes. I love history. And my favorite part of history is political geography, the way the boundaries of nations have changed over the years, especially in the New World. I also have maps I created that show who is where in the New World…and I'm never gonna print them in the book because that gives it all away.
Once you do that, it'll take away the sense of discovery.
Yeah. That's right. You want to feel like you don't know where you are. But I've got that all plotted out. Different (European) countries have different regions (in the New World), some that follow true history, and some that follow different directions.
Well, there's the obvious device you can use where Jack is from a different time, and is sort of out of place in this world. Are you going to use that device?
I know that plays into the humor a little bit, because that's the scene I was referring to a little bit before with the uncles and Cinnabar. When I thought this up, it just cracked me up, and basically the uncles are so clueless, they start talking about "What you need on this ship is a good engine…" and they start describing, y'know, "Let's make an engine! C'mon," saying it needs steel and this and that, and Cinnabar's playing along like (English accent) "Oh, all right." "Oh, we have excellent steel!" But it's just, it's ridiculous really! (Laughs).
You should really emphasize that Cinnabar has an English accent, because it's so much more hilarious, hearing you do his voice.
(Laughs).
So you obviously have so much enthusiasm for this project, and when you have enthusiasm do you feel you work better?
Oh yeah. This is so important, and I had lost that for so long. I refer to after Habitrails and before Colonia as my fat Elvis period (laughs). Just wasn't doing the good work. And didn't even know it. So, that's all come back. I mean, I've just moved beyond anywhere I've been, as far as personal satisfaction.
I think everybody notices that, because when I was telling my comic store guy that I was gonna do this interview, he said, "Oh, I've liked that guys work, but Colonia is just the best thing he's ever done." And I think people really seem to latch onto Colonia. I think it's because of your enthusiasm for the work.
That's good to hear, and I think that enthusiasm was necessary for me to look inward and discover why I love to draw comics, and not think about how to sell them so much, even though that's still important, I need to promote them, but I really needed to just love to be there drawing it.
This (Colonia) is still primarily for my own artistic pleasure, but there's some commercial thoughtfulness in it. I was aware of the ability of artists like Jeff Smith and Linda Medley to not only reach people who just appreciate good comics, but tap into that old fashioned kind of comic book fan. But I guess as far as the old fashioned comic book readers go, my work appeals to people who really just grew up loving comics, as a kid, who read the same stuff as I did growing up, like Kamandi, who loved TV shows like Lost in Space. That primary enjoyment is that you want to be there. And that's what I remember most about those shows and those comics, is thinking "I wish I could go there. I wish I could talk to the robot."
(Laughs).
Actually I did get to talk to him! A few months ago the robot was here in downtown San Francisco. They were preparing to film a commercial right on the sidewalk. No one was even stopping to look, but I just stood there transfixed like a little kid. Then I realized Bob May (the actor who worked the suit in the original series) was standing right there. I got to shake his hand and tell him I was a big fan of his work. It was a happy day.
I hope you didn't see that Lost in Space movie.
Ohh. Horrors.
I saw it, but I was never a fan of the old Lost in Space, but I still didn't like it because it was so noisy, there were so many effects, and from the small amount of LIS I've seen, I just knew the Hollywood execs missed the whole point. It was so absurd to slap the LIS name on this bloated project.
The best part of (the old) Lost in Space is Jon and Don just sitting at their little picnic table in the dirt, with a cup of coffee, bitching at Doctor Smith. That's the best part (laughs). But they didn't even do that in the movie.
Hollywood people see something that was popular once, and automatically know they can make money on it. And they did! I mean, you went to see it!
Yeah, because I'm an old fan, and I had to go. But yeah, I think that's the audience I'm trying to reach, is that old fashioned fan, that still respects and enjoys their young persons look at comics, whereas a lot of the hipster comics crowd ignore the fact that they enjoyed simple fun comics when they were a kid. They wanna deny that.
Your comics are like "C'mon, join the fun" when Hipster one's are like "Well, maybe your good enough to read this if you really try"
Right. We'll get back to you.
Of course, it doesn't just appeal to old fans, it has really wide range appeal, because it's so much fun. Okay, last question. So far, how do you feel about your contribution to the comics' field?
Well…I guess beyond just my work, I think I'm a role model for tenacity. People will come up to me, and say, "Wow, you're still doing this?" I think younger cartoonists can look to me, and say, "Well, he had some problems, but he's still putting stuff out, and he's not broke, so maybe I can make it too." So, since I've been at this for so long, I think that's my best contribution.
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