When you have my job, you get to meet movie stars and famous directors and Hollywood starlets and blah, blah, blah. But those guys are mostly a bore. And besides, it's not every day that one gets to shoot the s#!t with the man whose comics you grew up reading! For me, that would be Walt Simonson, whose acclaimed run on titles like Thor and X-Factor in particular helped shaped a young Collura's comics-reading habits (well, me, and every other kid reading comics at the time that is).
I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk to Simonson recently because of his new book from Titan… or rather, his new old book. Alien: The Illustrated Story is a restored rerelease of his and writer Archie Goodwin's excellent graphic-novel adaptation of the Ridley Scott film that was originally created for Heavy Metal over 30 years ago (read my review here. An Original Art Edition of the book is also out next week which reproduces all of Simonson's black and white boards, in full size and complete with all of the little details and imperfections of the pre-published comics art, plus an interview with Simonson, original script pages, sketches and more.
The main topic of our conversation was the Alien book and its creation, but we also delve into his recently released labor of love for DC, The Judas Coin, his thoughts on returning to his classic titles like Thor, and much more.
Scott Collura: First of all, I have to ask, were you drawing when I called just now?
Walt Simonson: Well, I’ve got some stuff I’ve got to get done. I was working on some drawing, but that’s all right. I can draw after we talk!
SC: How many hours a day do you draw?
WS: Depends entirely on my deadlines. If my deadlines are a long way off, I don’t draw that much. If my deadlines are tomorrow, I’m drawing like a madman. And right now my deadlines are tomorrow, so I’m drawing like a madman. [Laughs]
SC: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe your big break came with Manhunter, which you worked on with Archie Goodwin, right?
WS: That’s right.
SC: So you obviously worked on Alien with Archie as well. Can you tell me about how that partnership came about on Alien?
WS: Well, the short version is that John Workman, who was the art director at Heavy Metal at the time, called me about the possibility of inking the Alien graphic novel adaptation of the movie over Carmine Infantino['s pencils] -- but he hadn’t been able to get a hold of Carmine at that point, so we talked about it and it sounded like fun. Eventually, we reached a point where I was going to pencil it, and I suggested that Archie would be a good guy to have write the words themselves in the comic. So that’s how that worked out.
SC: And of course, you and John Workman have had a longstanding relationship with each other since then.
WS: [Laughs] Yes we do, and that was the first time we worked together.
SC: As far as the process of actually creating the visuals of the comic, did you have any kind of access to the art from the film? How did that all work?
WS: We had all kinds of stuff. I was actually shown a rough cut of the film. It was close to two and a half hours long. This was in December of 1978 -- the movie came out in May of '79. So at the end of '78, 20th Century Fox provided a lot of references. At the time, Heavy Metal was also producing a book called The Book of Alien, which was a film book; they weren’t as common then as they are now, but it was a book about the making of the film. So they had a lot of references and slides from the film. I was able to have them essentially make photostats of the slides, blow them up. They were just black and white -- terrible reproduction value, you’d never be able to use them for anything, really -- but they were great for visual reference. 20th Century provided some other photographs and stills. Archie and I also had three different script revisions that were maybe two months apart each, and we were able to really just do our version of a comic using that material to create the graphic novel, as it turned out.
SC: How much attention did you pay to H.R. Giger when you were drawing that book?
WS: Well, I had a book of Giger’s stuff that came out before Alien, so I looked at that when I was drawing. We didn’t have a lot of clear shots of the alien. I think I had one where he was tipped over, sort of standing but bent over. And there were some detail shots. So I looked at Giger’s paintings for a sense of texture, a sense of the external skeletal quality of the character, and kind of went from there.
SC: Even on the first two pages where you draw the Alien title, it’s in that sort of skeletal techno-organic style.
WS: Sure, I just looked at this book of Giger stuff that I had and laid out the lettering, then I went in there with pencil, pen and ink and kind of drew up the series of textures that at least reminded me of Giger’s work. Then we used watercolor to kind of simulate that and give it some sense of the alien before you’ve read the book or seen the movie. You wouldn’t know quite what that was about, but it would resonate later after you had read the graphic novel.
SC: So what was it like when you saw the film? I assume you were done with the book by the time you saw the final film?
WS: The final one, yeah. I saw that when it came out. The book had to be published right at the same time the film was released. I don’t exactly remember how close -- same week or whatever it was. So essentially we had a drop-dead deadline to get the graphic novel finished by early April. There had to be time to get the art separated, essentially made print ready, and then sent to the printer -- printed, bound, trimmed and fired off to retail stores so that on the week the movie came out, the book would be available. By the time the movie came out, I’d finished the book four or five weeks earlier. So it was very neat. It was interesting -- there were bits that were different from the rough cut I had seen; by that time I had seen the rough cut almost six months earlier, so I didn’t remember a lot of stuff clearly. But there were a few things here or there that were different in the release cut. I thought that was kind of interesting.
SC: And even with the comic itself, I think one of the things that’s very effective for a fan of Alien who reads the comic is that it plays as sort of an alternate version of the events. Everything that happens is the same, but because we know Alien so well, angles are different; the length of scenes are obviously different. The characters look like the characters, and yet they’re your versions of the characters. In those ways, it kind of plays like an alternate version of the film, which is so cool.
WS: [Laughs] Well, we had a lot of room to maneuver, but of course I could never do a scene-for-scene drawing of the film. Honestly, I’m not sure I would have wanted to, really. What’s the point? But we had a lot of freedom, so what Archie and I tried to do was create a graphic novel that was the most effective comic book we could do of that story using all the stuff that we had, the raw material, as the foundation for building that comic. And that’s how it worked out.
Source : ign[dot]com
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