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| Art by Jason Latour |
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| Art by Jason Latour |
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| Page from Top 10, written by Alan Moore, art by Gene Ha and Zander Cannon. |
[...] how do you go from working on independent titles in your early 20s and just starting out and then working with Alan Moore?
I mean, it was crazy. Chiefly, I was working with Gene Ha because he and I were sharing a studio. He was in town with me, and so I was taking these pretty, legendarily-dense scripts and parsing them out as artwork. At the time, I thought, "I'm just here to speed things up." I came to realize that that's not really true. What I brought to Top 10 was more that it made the storytelling very matter of fact. I wouldn't say workmanlike, but documentarian style. Because Gene, I think, as much as he's a realist in his rendering, is a 90s cartoonist. He wants to have that punch, and he wants to have that wild, fisheye lens shot. I was the one being the buzzkill and saying, "No, we've got to have this pretty neutral shot because something extremely weird is happening." Or all these characters are meant to be perceived one by one.
So, how'd you meet Gene?
He and I did a signing at a store near Purdue University. It was the first time that anybody had really asked me to do a signing, so I was pretty young, probably 25 or so. And Gene is just a couple years older than I am, and I knew his work, so it was fun to chit-chat with him; the signing wasn't exactly mobbed or anything. He had some people coming up and talking to him, but nobody really knew who I was, and so we had a lot of time to just talk, so we were friendly. Then coincidentally he was moving up to the Twin Cities for a different reason. I think he was just looking for a change and he was going to collaborate on Top 10 with somebody else, and that fell through for whatever reason. Then I was top of mind, I guess.
Originally, this guy was going to do backgrounds, and so Gene asked me if I wanted to do that, and I'm like, I don't know if I've got the chops to do Gene Ha's backgrounds, you know what I mean? But I feel like I'm a strong – or at that point, getting to be a stronger–storyteller, so I could do layouts and design. I could design these pages and give him a running start because all of his stuff is so time-intensive and "high-budget," as it were. That's a lot of rendering on someone's hair if they're one inch too far to the left. That was a learning thing, too. I draw backgrounds of buildings just as boxes. He draws them as fully rendered things, so do not put them in if they're not absolutely necessary.
You were trying to save him time as you're doing it, too.
Yeah, and I think that was really fruitful once we got it down. Because there were a couple tries at a couple different approaches. You can see in the earlier issues where it's like, Oh, I drew that whole section. But like, it doesn't match, or it was easier just for me to do the first part, him to do the second part.
I really look back at Top 10 as being a game changer in terms of one of the checkboxes you have to have in a career, which is: why does anybody know your name? I can do all the indie books I want, and maybe people will have heard about that, but it's like, Oh, if you work with Alan Moore, you're vetted. In a way, it's nice that that's kind of all it is. People don't really ask me about Top 10 anymore. I'm happy that I have other stuff that people want to ask me about. And it's obviously more relevant to me as a person.
How did Alan Moore's writing affect yours? I saw some Kaijumax scripts, but they don't look like Batman: The Killing Joke scripts.
[Laughs] Well, when I wrote the Kaijumax script, it was not originally for me. It was for Ryan Browne. But even then, I was probably trying to hold back. I do like to write detailed scripts. And I think that Alan Moore was instrumental in that, in that his scripts typically described a limited number of layouts, because you only need a limited number of layouts, especially to tell a story that's that type of genre story. That really helped when I was interpreting these excellent scripts into layouts. I started seeing the rhythm of these pages that I'm creating out of his sheet music, so to speak. And that really helped me sort of figure that out. He was such a good writer and when he's working within a really narrow framework, this sort of cop drama, it's nice to perceive those tropes of the cop drama and lean into them, play them up rather than have to fight against them at every turn.
So you do the layouts for Top 10, then you're the artist on Smax, which Moore writes. And then you're the writer and artist of Top 10: Season Two with Gene Ha. It's like a fast track mentorship program to professional comics publishing. [Cannon laughs] What would you tell yourself now if you could go back to that person who's just about to start doing layouts on the first issue of Top 10?
Yeah, I would say enjoy it. Enjoy it a little bit more and realize you don't have to over deliver. You can just do what's asked of you.
Were you trying to impress Alan and Gene?
I mean, sure, but I think I was trying to encroach on Gene's part of the art. He and I have a different aesthetic and I was probably trying to make the art more grounded. He was trying to make it more like the way he makes it. I think that there was a little bit of push-pull there. And I could have backed off an inch and I think I would have been happier. He would have been happier. I did, I just would have done it earlier. [...]
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| Art by Émile Bayard |
Rick Veitch created a bunch of illos for the first part of "Things to do on a rainy day" and for the other parts the graphic side was on you. How did you manage this? How did you pick the accompanying images? Which are you favourite ones? Did you receive any indication from the Moores about that?
John Coulthart: The first Rainy Day section was the only one with any planned illustration, nothing had been decided for the other sections. At the outset I suggested asking Rick to do more illustrations but Alan didn't think it right to continue using drawings of kids in the sections concerning sex magic, drug-taking and so on. So this was another area of the book where I was acting as art director, choosing images with some connection to the contents. The first picture I chose was the full-page illustration of a Sabbath scene by Émile Bayard from Histoire de la Magie (1870). I'd tracked down this illustration several years ago after seeing it erroneously attributed to Gustave Doré and was curious about the origin. Once I'd decided to use this for the Rainy Day sequence I decided to fill out the rest of the chapters with similar antique imagery to give these sections a consistent feel. At the very end everything comes full circle with another picture of two junior magicians which I adapted from an illustration in an old magazine.
What's about the Kabbalah section? How did you approach such a fundamental section? I feel a "keep it simple" approach in terms of the associated images. I really like the change of color to indicate the related Sephiroth in the tree graph...
This was much more like doing something for a text book so the decision was to present the basic elements of the Tree of Life in a clear manner. The full-page illustration is very detailed, and probably rather confusing at first sight for people who haven't seen it before. I created the small single Sephiroth illustrations to go with the text in order to show the very basic arrangement of the ten spheres from each every other part of the philosophy derives. When you're learning about the Kabbalah you have to learn the names and positions of the Sephiroth before anything else. Once their arrangement is clear then everything follows from this.
