Broken Frontier

British indie writer and penciller  Simon Gane has had a big year in 2007. He made the critically well received GN Paris with alternative masthead  Andi Watson, published by SLG Publishing  and he banged in the door at Vertigo, the adult content driven publishing branch of DC Comics, producing Vinyl Underground with TV writer Si Spencer and  Cameron Stewart. Broken Frontier talked to Simon about Paris, working for a large publisher and about his influences and motivations, living a life dealing with art.

Broken Frontier: In general, you dug your way through the trenches of mini-comics all the way to the top, working with Andi Watson for SLG Publishing and doing work for mainstream publisher Vertigo/DC comics. How are things from the other side of the coin, working for a Warner Bros conglomerate?

Simon Gane: That’s a fair question, Bart, though I obviously don’t consider myself to be at the top. But I take your point about there being some semblance of progress! I’ve always tackled any project the same way, to try my best and to try to improve. Whatever the story or company, it’s still just me and a sheet of blank paper when it comes to the actual process of drawing. Things are both different and similar for that reason and others. They differ in that working for Vertigo literally gives me permission, or the right to draw comics.

Whilst money’s never been the motivating factor for my comic work, I needed it to carry on making them. Beforehand, it had really reached a point where I couldn’t justify non-paying comic work anymore, at least not spending as much time as I wanted to on them. Being given the chance by Vertigo, allowed me to carry on drawing. Naturally there’s less control in certain ways - the project must reflect everyone involved. So it’s my duty to satisfy my collaborators because otherwise I’m not the right person for the job - whether I do so is another matter! An advantage of this system is I can just crack on with my side of things.

Whilst I definitely want to continue working in the more personal style of, say, Paris, I feel I’ve learnt much about the mechanics of the comic language thanks to all I’ve worked with at Vertigo and that can only be beneficial. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t found it difficult at times, but thankfully I don’t deal with the conglomerate, I deal with patient, enthusiastic and talented humans, with fellow comic fans.

BF: What gets you through the day, making comics? Is it a deep love that you feel for the medium? With all the reprints of old comics doing so well these days, do you feel that there’s a lot of potential left untapped in the comics world? That creators are still looking for new approaches to telling stories or do you think that , in general, creators rely to much on the past?

SG: Yes, it’s a love of the medium and in drawing generally. Motivation has never been a problem, but it is hard to sustain productivity. For instance, a period of productivity is always followed by one in which nothing seems to click and relatively little is achieved. You need those frustrating times, but it’s a pain in the ass! So yeah, overall I love it, I hope people get that sense when reading Paris.

To answer your other question, I’m not overly fussed for new approaches to story-telling, certainly not if they’re stylistic devices for the sake of it - although I know what you mean. It’s a medium that developed quickly and its masters were often also its founders. If an aspiring cartoonist learned from the likes of Herriman, Segar, Hergé and Kirby, he or she could do a lot worse. It’s not about finding new approaches to telling stories but about telling more of the right ones, of widening the scope of comics that way. Any stylistic tricks should be geared towards making them more legible to the new reader. This isn’t some secret club, it’s another medium.

BF: How does a working day look for you? Do you keep yourself to a tight schedule, like a nine to five job or do you approach it in a more hectic way, when inspiration strikes?

SG: I definately work best when I am more disciplined, when I keep to the normal working day, plus overtime of course because it’s more than a job. I’m most focused first thing in the morning, and start the earlier the better, not that people who know me believe me capable of this. The other day my mother phoned and I told her I’d started work at 5am that day and she replied “LIAR.” But, no, I’ll put as many hours in as I can.

BF: On your blog, you post illustration work for music albums,  magazines and other mediums. In what mediums can people find your work and is this diversity something you actively pursue or do people approach you to work for their magazine or album covers?

SG: I don’t actively pursue the diversity, it really just comes from adapting to best suit the subject matter of the illustration in question. Within comics too, the style will vary depending on the subject or tone. In Paris I payed attention to the attractive details and tried to keep the art crisp and deliberate, but when drawing a Lovecraft adaptation, I went for a more claustrophobically dense look and inked more manically.

Anyway, as well as comic books I do a small amount of magazine illustration, but much less than I used to. I also do some design work, and the occasional record cover. I like drawing comics the most though, I like the on-going nature of them; that the characters you draw are more real, not just one-off icons as in illustration and that in comics you have the opportunity to improve in the next panel, page or chapter.

BF: Coming from a painterly background and being a professed fan of painters like  Degas  or  Ingres, what do you get from their work and how do you translate it to your comics work?

SG: I’d love to be able to translate elements of their work to my own, but they’re too good. Andi and I like both those guys and so he wove their work into Paris. Quite brilliantly I think, because the Ingres paintings appear in the story only when relevant to it, it’s not just me filling backgrounds. It’s more that other artists inspire me to do my own work, which happens to be comics. Like, instilling in me a general urge to create something. I think that’s the same with everyone. I don’t pay much attention to fine artists these days - I’m more interested in comic art - but over the years I’ve enjoyed reading about them. I drew a few short comics about the painter and sculptor Modigliani. I loved his work when I was in my teens and collected many biographies and so on. I’d buy a book if it reproduced one painting I didn’t have in my others. The stories I did were loosely factual, more about the romantic anecdotes of his life, they were a sort of precursors to Paris in that way. Picasso is probably my favourite, I tried to nod to his fifties stuff at times whilst drawing that story so that it wasn’t just a car of the period that helped set the scene, but aspects of the era’s graphic style too. I don’t think that comes across in any obvious way, but it was good fun for me.

###

Come back the day after tomorrow for part two when we will show some pencil work by Simon Gane while he talks more about art, his influences and just why he uses those heavy scratchy lines.