ALEX: You've written, you've illustrated, you've done works across the offerings of genre, and not just in terms of comics. Is there a genre or kind of work you've not done that you'd like to, and if not, why not? Are genres a necessary but also limiting onus placed upon a creative work? Can a work that is free from genre labels be found by the audience you wish to find it?
DAVID HINE: When I started writing as a kid, I was happy to try every genre going. My first prose story was science fiction of the most basic kind. My second was a western, then a 19th century tale of highwaymen, then a secret agent story. I also used to write a daily serial in my diary – The C.S.S. – Children’s Secret Society about a group of kids who fought crime when their parents weren’t looking.
So I’m not opposed to labelling stories by genre though I am happiest when I’m mixing them up. The superhero genre is definitely not my cup of tea, particularly the superhero team books. I’ve always had an underlying theme of questioning the ethics of the heroes, whether it’s Batman or Spider-Man or Spawn. In the case of Spawn the theme is overtly about operating on the borderline between good and evil. I had a lot of fun working on that book.
When I am writing my creator-owned series I usually work across genres but always with an element of horror and fantasy. ‘Strange Embrace’ could have been a straight modern gothic tale but I added the supernatural element of the narrator being a mind-reader. ‘Lip Hook’ was rural horror in the style of ‘Wicker Man’ but again with a weird fantasy/supernatural element with the hallucinatory mists, the strange insects and the ghostly apparitions.
I think you are also asking whether a genre label helps to reach an audience. That is probably true and is something that may have worked against me in some ways. I have never stuck to a single style or genre so people really don’t know what to expect from me. I had a definite feeling that the indie audience ignored my more niche work for a long time because they associated me with Marvel and the X books, then with Batman stories and Image characters like Spawn and The Darkness. If I could choose, I would only work on the creator-owned books where I have complete control over the story and I work only with the artists I know as friends as well as collaborators. Unfortunately, the income from those books just doesn’t pay the bills. I’ve been very lucky to be able to mix the creator-owned work with the ‘day job’ of writing mainstream comics that pay quite well.
I would like to stretch myself outside of comics. I want to write prose novels and screenplays and there’s also a non-fiction book I have been working on for a few years now. I’m not going to talk about that at all yet. I feel that talking about it would jinx it. My first novel was a murder story that did okay with agents but was never published so I eventually cannibalized it for ‘Daredevil Redemption’ and the Aftershock series ‘Second Sight’. I’ve worked on a couple of screenplays. Neither of them have been made into movies of course. I’ve come to learn that everyone writes screenplays and about one in 10,000 actually makes it to the screen. It’s very enjoyable though, easier than writing comics because you don’t have to limit the dialogue to the 130-odd words you can fit on a comic book page or figure out the panel breaks or describe backgrounds. You just write dialogue. It’s character and action. Physically writing a full script for comics can be quite tedious when it comes to the panel descriptions and page layouts. I’ve spoken to writers from TV and movies who are knocked back by the amount of work they’re expected to do to make a comic book script.
ALEX: As a comic book creative talent you've an opportunity to create
stories that, outside of your time and life circumstances at the time
of creation, have no barriers, or limits regarding budget. I'm
referring to the fact that while a movie or story have basic
limits
found in budget and ability, a talented comic book writer and
artist
(in your case both) can express into being a world that the
reader
might never have imagined, in as much depth, look, feel, history,
as
the creative talent can create. I've read some writers look at
sequential work as being limited by format, but, in your
experience,
wouldn't you argue that it was quite the opposite? Limited,
that is,
only by the hand on the pen and fingers on the keys?
DAVID HINE: Comics are cheap! It’s a given that you can create entire worlds, destroy cities, launch armies of giant monsters, blow up planets and invent whole dimensions full of weird wonders for the price of a bottle of ink, a pen or brush and a stack of paper. Look what Kirby created over the years. Every issue of Fantastic Four is at least $50 million worth of movie. I totally agree that the only limit is the imagination of the creators.
As for the limitations of the medium itself, I’ve thought quite a bit about what makes comics unique and separate from, for instance, the written form and movies. A novel is the most abstract means of expression. It’s just black symbols on white paper – meaningless until you learn the language and even then words are only an approximation of real meaning. Even a word like ‘chair’ means something very different to you and me. There are an infinite numbers of chairs, or idea of chairs, made of wood or metal, covered in fabric, cushioned, adjustable and so on. No matter how many adjectives you attach to the word ‘chair’ your reader is still applying the word to their own experience of chairs.
Once you start to describe a character it gets even more complex. Every reader is creating a different version of the story they are reading. And the images in their head will also be in a constant state of flux. You can be 50 pages into a book with a very vivid image of the lead character in your head, when the write will decide to have him stroking his beard – and now your character is no long clean-shaven as you imagined they were.
At the other extreme, a movie fixes the characters, locations and time period very firmly and very quickly. Unlike comics, the movie also supplies sound and movement. Most importantly it moves at a fixed pace. A two-hour movie takes two hours to watch and time is passing in much the same way as in real life. There may be passage of time between scenes but the scenes are moving at a fixed pace and you can’t go back and re-watch a scene (at least until the advent of the videotape you couldn’t). Weirdly though, every viewer will still be watching a different movie. Just try discussing your favourite move with your friends, or read reviews, to see the range of interpretations that can emerge.
Comics are a weird hybrid of these and other mediums. There is above all the peculiar sensation of turning a page and being simultaneously presented with numerous visual depictions of different moments in time. It’s impossible not to take in all those panels at once before you start to focus on the top left image and move across the pages, your peripheral vision is constantly aware of those other snapshots of time. You are of course also in control of how quickly you absorb the images, whether you skip images, turn back to a previous page, put the comic down halfway through and go back to it later. You are probably also subconsciously filling in the gaps that occupy the margins, the spaces between the panels. It’s a chaotic way to tell a story and the more I read reviews of my own work the more I realise that the level of concentration varies with different readers. It’s very easy to misinterpret things, to miss subtleties of storytelling or draw ‘wrong’ conclusions. Once again, every reader is reading a different comic because the audience is contributing to the creation of the story through their interpretive method, based on their own experience of life and the other comics and other stories they have absorbed.
Incidentally there is another random element, which is the degree to which the artist and writer are telling their own versions of a story. There can be a close relationship or a conflicting dynamic between the creators but however close their vision may be there will still be a whole new version that comes out of the merging of writing and art.
ALEX: In reference to the big picture I am pointing at in the previous
question, do you think that comic books are only inhibited by the
audience aimed at in previous decades? That is, while the comic book
is a delivery vehicle of adventure, wonder, ideas and imagination, in
the past it was underutilized and aimed directly to children, and as
such it has been given a stain that is one of perception? Would the
great books of literature or all time great movies of cinema have
never been appreciated had they appeared, at least initially as comic
books? If so, how does the art form of comic books rise above such a
limited mind set of those who don't know how vast and brilliant it can
be? Superheroes are an area people point to that marks the credulity
of some to suspend disbelief and also, appreciate the work for what it
is... Is the limit found in perceptions mostly tied to the existence
in comics of superheroes?
I hope we have now reached a point of respect for the comics that deserve it. There’s still a lot of crap around but there are plenty of inferior movies and novels too. However, we now have a body of great work in comics that can’t be ignored. Comics are still not up there with cinema as a respected art form but we’re not far behind. What we definitely have is a diverse medium where creators can make their comics and reach their audience more effectively than ever before. It’s populist and egalitarian and cheap. It’s unfortunate that comics in the USA are still identified with the superhero genre but at the same time the superhero genre is also more expansive and varied than it used to be. I’ve just been watching WandaVision and find myself liking Marvel more than I ever have. Just so long as we also have room for End Of The Fucking World and This One Summer and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and everything by Chris Ware and so on.
ALEX: Do world events and the reality of existence limit a writer's work?
Do events like war or disease, disaster or assassination make the
work of an author one of reporting, or inclusion of such events into
the works they create rather than being purely creative and
imaginative? Can a writer escape the anchor effect of world events
without simultaneously abandoning realism or quality of word that
may appeal to everyone?
DAVID HINE: The real world and personal experience always creep into creative work, no matter how fantastic or unreal the setting. I have done some straight political/current affairs comics but I’m happiest writing fantasy that just happens to deal with social issues as a subtext. When I wrote Spider-Man Noir I used the setting to deal with social deprivation and racism. That was a fantasy alternate world, set in the past but dealing with issues that are dominating our current political discussions. I think that’s more effective than writing straight ‘relevant’ stories. As I say, I have written issue-based comics and ‘educational’ comics but they always feel a bit heavy-handed. Having said that, I do read some non- fiction comics that I have found very useful as an introduction to complex issues. Most recently I read ‘The Black Panther Party: A Graphic History’ by David Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson and that did an amazing job of covering the history of the Panthers that helped to put the other books I have read into perspective. Comics are capable of creating a very effective overview. It may be that it’s the best way to reach a generation that demands visual input. I hope the pure written word survives but I guess we have to accept that human beings are becoming remodelled to absorb high-speed visual input.
ALEX: What project or projects do you have ongoing, and in the near
future, where will they appear? Tell us if you would, what you would
like us to know about your recent and upcoming works?
I also have a third series with Brian Haberlin for Shadowline comics at Image. This one is a science-fiction version of The Lighthouse At The End Of The World, by Jules Verne featuring a cranky robot and bloodthirsty libertarian space pirates. It follows Sonata and The Marked. Brian has innumerable concepts on the back burner and I have been working with him on the scripts for those for a couple of years now. We work very well together, throwing ideas back and forth. It’s a very collaborative process and I think we both enjoy poking and prodding until the characters and stories take shape. We know each other well enough to be able to tell one another when we are talking bollocks.
That’s also true of my relationship with Mark Stafford and we are planning another excursion into weirdness and hilarity to follow Lip Hook and The Bad, Bad Place. It’s going to be a kind of sequel to H. G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ plus any story either of us has ever read set on an island. We plan to create a whole archipelago of miniature lands inhabited by whatever monstrosities Mark can come up with.
Apart from those projects I am also gently editing another graphic novel with Sophie and Scarlett Rickard. They are following up their wonderful adaptation of the socialist novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell with an adaptation of the suffragette novel ‘No Surrender’ by Constance Maud. Once again this is an important political novel, written in the early twentieth century when women in Britain were still fighting for the vote. Like ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ it’s very timely as women’s struggle for genuine equality has moved to the forefront of contemporary politics.
ALEX:
Thank you so much David! Please share your social media and various
links to let
the readers know where to find you, what you've done and where you play online.
DAVID HINE: My social media are:
www.Twitter.com/HineDavid
www.Facebook.com/david.hine.98
My handle on Instagram is davidhine56
https://www.instagram.com/davidhine56/
I also have a blog, which hasn’t been updated in a while but has lots of material. That’s: www.waitingfortrade.com
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