Broken Frontier

Continuing our Inter-Review with Michael S. Bracco and his latest work Novo Volume 1: The Birth of Novo, the first of a 7-volume sequel to his critically-acclaimed one-shot Birth.

Birth was published through Alterna Comics and can be purchased through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  Alternately, you can download the entire graphic novel for free at  Wowio.com

Novo Volume 1 will hit shelves later this month (June 25, 2008) and can be ordered at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and is also readily available for free download (as three separate chapters, labeled Issues #1-3) at Wowio.

Broken Frontier Review: Finally, after two chapters that—while brilliantly conceived for atmospheric impact and containing story beats which couldn’t, following any sort of logic, be skipped over—still did little more in essence than to recap all that readers knew from the events of Birth, Novo Volume 1 enters into its third and final chapter. And this is where I dare any reader not to become hopelessly hooked for the remaining six volumes to come. Without giving any of the extraordinary events away, the last third moves into territory that had Bracco skirting the lines of the great comic auteurs of the past, including Frank Miller, Erik Larsen, Doug TenNapel (those are just off the top of my head). All of these creative giants, when they wrote and drew and controlled in full their stories, had moments as blisteringly original, dramatic, effective, and unforgettable as the ending of Novo Volume 1.

BROKEN FRONTIER: I know you’ve been vocal about your admiration for Frank Miller, and I can see a lot of his influence in your creative but structured layouts, your unpredictable moments of story evolution and spartan (heh) commingling of image and text. If you could effectively popularize one new aspect of comics storytelling the way Miller did back in his heyday, what would that be?

MICHAEL S. BRACCO: I don’t think that I will bring that ‘ONE NEW THING’ to the table but I would like to be known as someone who constantly strived to keep sequential art cinematic and literary at the same time. If we all kept on that path maybe more people who weren’t typically comic ‘fans’ will be able to open up to it and find something meaningful.

BF: Go ahead and name your top five writerly influences.  Feel free to list non-comic related writers if applicable.

MSB:  This will be all over the place and I might get some flack for it but here I go in no particular order…

1. Frank Miller – His protagonists are flawed and their integrity is strengthened by their flaws as his villains are truly motivated and driven to do their worst.
2. Luc Besson – Mostly because of Le Femme Nikita and The Professional.  I am amazed at how he writes elegant and thoughtful dialogue and motives for truly tragic characters (Clint Eastwood does this pretty damn well too but he doesn’t have the same beautiful sense of fantasy injected into reality)
3. J.K. Rowling – I wonder if I’ll get flack for saying that she’s arguably the literary mind (or at least influence) of our time. She writes cinematic classics that made literacy rates across the globe skyrocket. The best part was that she wrote something for pop culture that was liked because it was good and honest and had integrity.
4. George Romero – The first smart horror movie that was actually scary. Plus, a pioneer for civil rights as far as Film goes.  
5. Philip Pullman – We need to make it okay for our kids to question responsibly. The Dark Materials trilogy really changed the face of what we were allowed to talk about in front of the kids. He writes emotionally and rationally all at once and should be admired for it.

BF Review: The time has come to speak of Bracco’s art: not an easy thing to do. He  stands, currently, as one of those creators (like Kevin Cannon) most intensely involved in making his visuals inseparable from his text, but since I’ve covered (in vague) the basic points of plot, I’ll try to describe the art end of things, though this’ll be like trying to explain how a lady bug is so much more than just another beetle—tricky, if you haven’t just experienced it for yourself. To wit: Bracco is a blend of the best of small press and underground flamboyance mixed with the elegance of the mainstream genre adventure. I can’t help but see the traces of the very, very much missed Seth Fisher in Bracco’s stringy architecture and layered monstrosities, bent-posture characters and vast background vistas. Bracco is grittier than Fisher ever was, adding in a classic Eastman and Laird dark-urban heft. The final pages run the gamut of barren to fully realized landscapes, bipeds to crazy folded-up spiraling beasties. It’s an impressive range though a solid style all its own, and it’s bloody beautiful to behold.

BF: Describe your average approach to a page.  How long does it take you to do it?  And do you do any part of it digitally? Any part not digitally?

MSB:  I am decently computer literate but almost all of it is done by hand.  Here’s a quick breakdown…

1. It’s important to me that I say it out loud to someone who will be honest with me. Lots of times it can sound great in my head but idiotic on its way out.
2. I script it out like a screenplay as opposed to a comic script. At this point I shouldn’t be thinking about page layout, just the dialogue and plot points. I might just be getting visual ideas and am doing character and environment sketches.
3. Once I finish, I do a quick (5-10 minute) breakdown of the design of a spread (1 at a time) and then move right to final.  Each page takes 3 – 10 hours depending on the amount of panels, environment, text, etc. Only 5% of that is with a pencil though. My pencils are quick scribbles for the most part, just enough to understand gesture and structure, the rest is Micron pens. Then I do the breakdowns of the next spread and move on. I try to keep it a somewhat ‘stream of consciousness’ process to help keep the dialogue and the action impulsive and real.
4. Finally it’s scanned, cleaned up for print and ready. All the lettering is hand done so I don’t even have to do that.The only real computer art is the color for the cover which I do in Photoshop (I still work with PS6 – don’t laugh)

BF: Have you ever experimented with coloring your own work?  Do you ever plan to start?

MSB:  I do the colors for my covers and I love doing it but I think I would be bad at doing full interior colors. It’s the one thing that I would be okay with handing off to someone else. That said, I would probably still give color scheme samples to work from and be a real pain.

BF: What would you say is your greatest strength as an artist? Greatest weakness? And what have you improved the most on since you began self-publishing unknown mini-comics via Kinko’s?

MSB: I think that I shine with the figurative stuff. I relish in making non-human thing feel human and I think it’s something I've developed over the years and am comfortable with. The hardest thing for me to do is very technical environments.  It's also something that is a major aspect of Novo Book 3, so I have been working my but off to integrate it in a way that is ambitious and NOT an obvious weakness. 

As far as in the long term, I think the thing that has improved the most is the writing aspect, both visually and textually, at least I hope so!!! It's definitely the thing I've worked the hardest on. I look back on the things I did five years ago (hell, one year ago)  and cringe. Hopefully that trend will continue though!

BF Review: Novo looks to move Bracco into true-blue superstar territory. It might not be the huge best-seller every writer hopes to achieve, but it will likely be the opus that gets him notice well beyond the small press playing field. If he can stick to his guns and complete this magic little genie-made gem (my first wish: I want a comic I can like and admire), then his name should be whispered in the company of so many others that made it to the end of their first self-made series, in the company of Jeff Smith, Terry Moore, Dave Sim, Drew Hayes, and the like. An absolutely remarkable read, haunting in its undertones and mind-boggling in its over-such; this is the kind of story comics were invented to tell, a story that couldn’t work inside any other medium, barring a $700 million budget and the ability to cut it into seven full-length features.

BF: The next volume of Novo hits in the winter of this year, and what can readers expect in that one?

MSB:  More black gooey stuff. Oh, and cats – lots of cats, with long bows.  That doesn’t really mean anything I know. But it’s true.

BF: Will you be pursuing any other projects while you wade through the many years of Novo?

MSB:  I keep very busy. I am a full time middle school teacher and I run a craft business with my wife called Spaghetti Kiss (sounds cute doesn’t it?  It’s actually a name based after something kind of grotesque) where we sell her pottery and my screen printed apparel.

As for comics, I don’t do all that much other that Novo.  I did the cover for Jesus Hates Zombies and am (slowly) working on a GN with Stephen Lindsay called John Gunner*Galaxy Runner. It’s kind of like Austin Powers meets Barbarella meets James Bond. There’s no word on when that will get done but we’re pretty excited about it. 

BF: And you’ve allowed Alterna to put together two big collections that comprise the fair share of your unpublished (or at least non-self-published) works. Atty & Max and The Collective (and Other Stories). Tell us a bit about those.

MSB: Well, Atty and Max was the first comic I made during the last year of college. It follows a character with two faces on his head, one a naïve and kind soul, the other a real  bastard drunk. It’s Science Fiction with lots of gooey, nippley aliens that’s dripping with sophomoric humor. ‘The Collective’ was an Atty & Max story I wrote later on. A 10 page piece I did to advertise the book. Following that is a collective of short comic works I did over the 4 years between Atty and Max and Birth. I am kind of proud of The Collective in that it shows such a long span of time in a 100-page book. It’s also a really nostalgic piece for me.

BF: Thanks for your time, Michael. Quick, as a parting gift, name the one established property you’d jump at the chance to write no-holds-barred.

MSB: Battlestar Galactica is the most relevant and intelligent TV drama to date in my opinion and I would be honored to be a part of it. I wouldn’t care how either. I’d clean toilets if they asked me nicely.

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Birth was published through Alterna Comics and can be purchased through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  Alternately, you can download the entire graphic novel for free at Wowio.com

Novo Volume 1 will hit shelves later this month (June 25, 2008) and can be ordered at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, and is also readily available for free download (as three separate chapters, labeled Issues #1-3) at Wowio.

And be sure to visit Michael S. Bracco’s personal website and Birth of Novo site.