Broken Frontier

Painter and photographer José Villarrubia has collaborated with Alan Moore on the recent re-issue of Moore’s poem recounting gay history, The Mirror of Love, and provided images for Moore’s novel, Voice of the Fire. José met up with Broken Frontier’s Neil Figuracion at the San Diego Comic-Con  to discuss his work, his influences and his projects with Moore.

Part 1 – About things that should be seen.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Which came first for you, comics or photography?

JOSÉ VILLARRUBIA: Comics is something I’ve read all my life, ever since I was little. I grew up in Spain and in Spain all children read comics, because there’s a lot of childrens’ comics there, and all over Europe, really. So I’ve been reading comics as long as I can remember. Photography is something I started really liking when I was in my early teens. I didn’t do anything professional in Photography until I got a degree in Painting, when I was in my mid-twenties. Then I didn’t do anything professional in comics until a few years later.

BF: Is it right that you were involved in theatre?

JV: Very, very limited… I had a lot of friends that work in theatre, actors and so forth, and I always wanted to try something. And I did perform a play based on Alan Moore’s The Mirror of Love, which was directed by my friend David Drake. So that’s my one incursion into theatre. I helped build sets and [have] done promo work and done other stuff but nothing that I actually… nothing that I got involved with until that.

BF: Speaking of Alan Moore, how did you end up working with him?

JV: I thought of the idea of adapting The Mirror of Love. So I contacted him and asked him for permission. He was very excited. We remained in touch after that and then little by little we became friends. Basically it all began when I asked him if I could adapt his work for the stage.

BF: Now, The Mirror of Love was originally presented in Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), a book that Moore produced in the 80s. [The story featured] art by  Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch. Why did you feel the need to redesign the presentation of that poem?

JV: Well, I didn’t read the comic version of Mirror of Love until after the play was produced. I didn’t have a copy of it. I read [the poem] in an issue of a magazine called Rapid Eye that had a very interesting interview with Alan. To me it just worked as a text piece by itself. Alan finally sent me a copy of the art when I was through with the play and I got to see the work that Bissette and Veitch did. And then from the internet I got a copy of the script that Alan wrote, with his panel descriptions – very, very interesting stuff.

I did so much research about the material in the text for the play that… A friend of mine in France was the one that suggested that I do an illustrated version of The Mirror of Love, a new version. I told him that, well, it had already been illustrated and that I was working on another project with Alan, but [my friend] suggested it to my publisher, Chris Staros at Top Shelf. Chris was very supportive of the idea right away. He talked to Alan and I knew exactly how I would do it because of all the research I had done for the play. 

BF: Now, were the images in the book the ones you used in the play?

JV: No, they’re a product of a lot of the background research that I had done. I didn’t know what the Ladies of Llangollen looked like. I didn’t know what Sappho looked like. I didn’t know very much about Wilfred Owen. You know, there were so many references that were just… I didn’t know them, and I wanted to visualize them so I could do the play. That is not really a part of the actor’s training, but I’m not really an actor so it was really helpful for me to see what these things would look like.

So I used bits and pieces from the script that he wrote for the comic, some of the images are very similar to what he wrote, like the Spartan image. Others are really from the play, like the idea of a blackout in the middle of the story. That’s something that David Drake put in the middle of the play. Many of them are sort of my interpretations. Some of them are more literal than others. Some are metaphorical, sort of counter-posed to what it says in the text.

BF: What was the process for creating the visuals for Voice of the Fire?

JV: Oh, that was really fun. I asked Alan about this and he was… you know Voice of the Fire had only been published as a paperback in England. It never got a proper hardcover treatment. I think exactly that it’s a book that deserves it. So I asked Alan about this. To do the book, basically I did sketches of all the characters and then I realized that it would have been a little dull. So I thought Let’s mix it up! [Let’s] have some kind of portraits of the characters mixed with sketches, pictures of other things.

I went to Northampton and Alan actually wrote the map. He wrote all the places where the stories literally took place - because they are more or less historical, or where he imagines them taking place. Some of the things are still there; some of the buildings. Some of the things are not at all. So we drove around with this taxi driver and Melinda [Gebbie, Alan’s partner] and I went around. We took all these photographs and we went to this Roman settlement, which is housed in the middle of the woods, and all you have is a ring of dirt. That’s all that’s left. There’s not even stones left, but there’s a ring showing where you had them. We took some marvelous, marvelous things.

BF: Seeing the places must really fill out the novel for you. Each of these chapters takes place in a different spot, the way Alan Moore wrote it - he based it on history.

JV: And the more recent ones, for example the prison cell where the murderer has been. That’s still there, but a lot of the earlier ones are gone. A lot of the early places are just gone. The other thing is that I shot things that I didn’t use so I would have options. That’s how I went about doing it.

In the second part of Broken Frontier’s conversation with José, released this Friday, we discuss the invisible craft of comics coloring, and how Villarrubia approaches applying color to another artist’s work.