Broken Frontier

Welcome back to part two of our interview with Simon Gane, where we delve more into the art side of the comics business.

BF: You seem to work a lot with negative space in your drawings where streets, water or air become plain white, functioning as a counterbalance for your busy linework. Is that something that evolved from your painterly background? Like the positioning of the light source in a frontal way so that all details either fade away or fall to the foreground, exposed?

SG: Ah, I think you mean in pictures like the Paris title page and the one of Innsmouth where the sea and sky are both white. That actually evolved, not from painting, but from cartooning and graphic design needs.

Although the pictures themselves have blank areas, they might be filled with text later. It is fun to devise them though, and I think my inspirations might be the way Miroslav Sasek places an illustration on his This Is...children’s books; not slap-bang in the middle, but asymmetrically jutting off an edge, for instance. In comics, Eduardo Risso excels at incorporating negative space. He’ll have empty areas of a page but you’re never cheated out of intricate detail. If you have this common background across a page, you know that the colour or half-tone will add to giving it an overall unity, so I try to think like that too.

BF: Your work shows a definitive European influence most apparent in your older work, such as Arnie comix and your Punk Strips Collection. I see traces of Guido Crepax, Hector Umbra's Uli Oesterle, Tardi and Hugo Pratt in your work. In your newer work, it seems to be more below the surface in the design and composition. What are some of your favourite European creators and what aspects of their work do you enjoy?

SG: Yes, that’s unavoidable because European comics have been the main stuff I’ve enjoyed and absorbed. I loved Tintin from childhood, and it was an admiration that continued after I started collecting Marvel and DC comics in my early to middle teens. I then got into Moebius, Pratt, Tardi and so on and was also influenced by Franquin and Jacobs , loads of people. I loved them for different reasons of course, like Franquin for his stylishness and how even a facial expression can be laugh-out-loud funny. A possible generalisation of these Europeans is their slightly more staid compositions, the designed-sense you mention.

Mainstream American comics focus more on the dynamic because of the more physical subject matter they convey. I love a lot of their artists too of course, but have probably had longer periods of following European stuff. I enjoy many of the current usual suspects but because I don’t speak, say, French, and because they’re so prolific, it’s more difficult to delve deeper than it is with English-language comics. And the English-language comic scene has never been as varied and exciting as it is now, of course.

BF: There's a real contrast in the subject matter and the way you handle your linework. There's a dissonance between the cuteness factor and the choppy lines that seem to drag the retro style of your pages into the present. What kind of materials do you use to get that choppy blocky edge on your drawings?

SG: I use a dip pen and Indian ink on cheap paper that might catch or bleed a little. At first out of financial necessity, now more out of habit. I would like to use a brush more because I have a lot of admiration for people who have mastered using them, but often I find the things I’m drawing seem to fit a craggier line somehow and require the extra detail a nib allows. In my illustation work I never seem to get easy or simple commissions! They always require lots of detail, unless that’s just me putting it in. Probably a bit of both.

As for why there are these elements that clash or contradict, I think it’s just how things have worked out, how differing influences and subject matter have come together. If I have to draw cute puppies one day and punk rockers the next, there’s bound to be some cross-over. I always wanted the more aggressive punk strips to have a cuteness or light-heartedness and likewise tried to give the tamer stuff an edge.

BF: The way you use swirls of leaves and your compositioning (like the collage pages in Paris) delivers to the drawings a real musical feel. What kind of music do you like and do you adjust your listening habits to the projects you're working on?

SG: That’s a nice thing to say, especially as the leafy intro to Paris was an intentional nod to film credits which are generally accompanied by music. Originally those individual leaves floating without branches was a decorative way of letting me show details behind them and of hopefully giving them the lightness of Spring.

For some reason I  thought rendering them less representationally worked better to give the scenes a more general feel than a very specific and real-looking tree would. BUT! I’m afraid I don’t listen to anything nearly as serene as would befit that stuff. Although I enjoy many types of music to differing degrees, I largely listen to punk rock.

It goes without saying it’s not so conducive to the times when you need to concentrate, but if you’re doing something more mundane or if the thought has already been put in to whatever you’re doing and you’re on top of the process, I find the rhythm makes me work faster! That saved time is then cancelled out however, because I won’t have heard the postman and therefore have to go to collect whatever parcel they couldn’t fit through the letterbox!

BF: For Vinyl Underground, you and Cameron Stewart seem to have a closer working relationship than just drawing and inking. Your style looks totally different on the Vertigo monthly. I was curious as to how this style came about?

SG: A few reasons. I needed to draw in a more realistic style and gladly accepted doing so because who wouldn’t relish the opportunity to be involved in a Vertigo book? Whilst it meant re-learning everything, almost from scratch in my opinion, a part of me felt my personal work was becoming too stylised, too distanced from nature and I wanted to see if I could be more flexible than I was becoming. Obviously some people will still say it’s very cartoony, but that’s as it should be, if I want something life-like I’ll watch a movie (that’s probably a bad example in this CGI day and age!). It would have been easier if I was drawing in my usual way, but less challenging.

The real challenge was on Cameron’s part, though! Whilst his work is stylish and clean, it has a naturalism one wouldn’t associate with my stuff. So he bought that to the art along with his more varied line-quality and just his general artistry really. So it was always going to look very different, but it was the sort of look I always envisioned. I wouldn’t have liked it if it was inked closer to my style because that would have been pointless. I’m now working with Ryan Kelly, another amazing artist, so my humility continues! Working with these folks certainly drives me to try and improve.

BF: And to end the interview, the question to all questions:  what has life in comics taught you?

SG: Come on, Bart, this is no life! No, I’m kidding. I don’t know what it’s taught me, but there’s a lot of talented and creative people in the world - it’s good to be involved in a scene that reminds you of that on a daily basis.

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Paris from SLG Publshing  is available from  your favourite LCS or at an online dealer. You can follow Simon Gane’s many projects on his blog  that is stuffed to the gills with his art.