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| Indestructible Hulk #6 preview art by Walt Simonson |
By Jim Beard
True story: Legendary artist Walt Simonson has never worked before with equally-legendary writer Mark Waid. Longtime friends, the two creators waited until the absolute right project came along for them to combine their talents in one titanic tale. That story, years in the making, begins in INDESTRUCTIBLE HULK #6, out April 3.
However, an illustrator the caliber of Simonson demands more than just a single large personality like the Hulk to draw, so Waid brought in another character his friend’s somewhat familiar with: the Mighty Thor.
We wanted to know how Simonson approached such a massive undertaking like this three-part INDESTRUCTIBLE HULK epic “Gods and Monsters,” so we arranged an exclusive four-part interview to illuminate how he works. In part two, the artist whisks us way to faraway places as he describes how he works with the incredible environments of this story and infuses them with his own brand of reality.
Marvel.com: Walt, what’s important to you when presenting an environment in a story? When do you dazzle the reader with the backgrounds, and when do you step back and focus on the characters?
Walt Simonson: I don’t know that I could give you a formula for that. Mostly, it’s one of those things I kind of know when I see it. Usually, if I’m shifting to a new environment somewhere in the story, I will try and get the establishing shot laid out so that you’ll have some sense of what the local environment is like that the action is taking place in. I try to choreograph the action in a way that the characters aren’t lost in the environment and neither is the reader. They always have a sense going through it. You know, if some guy’s on [another] guy’s left-hand side, he remains on the left-hand side in that conversation. Not necessarily [in] the panel, but the way the figures are standing, the way they’re standing in relation to other stuff.
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| Indestructible Hulk #6 preview art by Walt Simonson |
There was an artist many years ago who was the original artist for a newspaper strip out of England called “Modesty Blaise.” His name was Jim Holdaway. Died young. Brilliant artist. Big influence on my work. One of the characters in “Modesty Blaise” had a penthouse, and Holdaway roughed out some architectural sketches of the floors so that he would always know where the action was and where the characters were in relation to other stuff in the room. I’m not quite that elaborate in anything I do by a long shot, but I will, occasionally, rough out an environment. I usually plan, too. I want to make sure I know what’s left, what’s right, what’s in front, what’s in back and keep it straight.
Marvel.com: So sometimes a literal floor plan?
Walt Simonson: Yeah. A floor plan, really. You don’t see everything in every panel; I like detail, but I like detail in selected amounts. There’s an old story—a comparison of art in real life—that was something I got in art school a million years ago. You know, a vase is an object, and a picture of the vase is not only a picture of the vase, it is also its own object. And the result is it doesn’t have to be exactly like the vase because it has its own reality.
In that sense, when designing a page, when designing an environment, in some panels, for example, I may think it’s more dramatic to have a headshot of some guy, but with negative space around the head, empty space around the head because it looks more dramatic. And filling that in with a lot of stuff that’s behind him as if it were a photograph, and you were taking a picture of a guy in a room. So, I choose the details that I put in my panels fairly carefully, and I usually choose it in ways that I hope encourage the flow of the story. I’m generally mindful of the transition from one panel to the next; I mean that’s what comics are about. So much of my thought goes into that and into how best to make that transition effective, not only from panel to panel but through a page and across a whole job.
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| Indestructible Hulk #6 preview art by Walt Simonson |
Marvel.com: How are you approaching the design of Jotunheim, land of the Frost Giants, in INDESTRUCTIBLE HULK?
Walt Simonson: Well, as far as the environment of Jotunheim, that is mostly referenced [from] the Antarctic and the Arctic, actually, up in northern Canada. Some of the mountain ranges up there; I’ve got a couple of books of photographic essays of some of that stuff. I’ve just gone ahead and I’ve presumed it’s a wild land of wind and swirling snow and giant mountain peaks, and that’s the Jotunheim I’m drawing.
So far, I haven’t gotten to draw any of the dwellings of the Giants. There is one of an ice castle of some kind that’s later in the second issue. I’ve done some layout work on that. Mark had a couple suggestions, and I’m kind of hoping to incorporate ice and large beasts and other stuff into a three-point perspective. It’ll be a down-shot across the castle. It’ll give you a sense of perhaps the wildness of it.
Marvel.com: With the ice and beasts, you mean statuary and the like?
Walt Simonson: The beasts run about probably half the size of the castle or bigger. It might be part of the castle, so it won’t be little sculpted delicacies. Giants aren’t really into delicate art sculptures. I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but that’s not the direction I’m planning to go. But the insides, they’ll be sculpted out of ice, and I’d like to just make fairly huge halls and monumental furniture and whatever else I can throw in there as I go along. They won’t be highly decorated. [For the Frost Giants] a little body armor too, not so much the Norse stuff, but maybe gauntlets or a harness across the chest—some very simple metal decorations. Again, not very fancy. I don’t think the Giants do a lot of metalwork in their spare time. But I’ve kept them fairly simple and fairly pure as ice creatures.
Marvel.com: Will we see Asgard itself in the story?
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| Indestructible Hulk #6 cover by Walt Simonson |
Walt Simonson: We do get an interior shot of Thor’s hall in the first issue. There’s no exterior shot of Asgard, but Thor is obviously at home when things begin to happen. I don’t think there’s any in the second issue and I haven’t seen the plot for the third one yet, so I don’t know where Mark plans to go [with that].
Marvel.com: Even with fantasy environments like Jotunheim and Asgard, is it important to you that what you draw looks like it works or could work, or is the pure design of things more important?
Walt Simonson: You know, again, it depends on what you’re designing. If I were designing somebody walking on a tesseract, I might look at M.C. Escher’s work to try and figure out some way to make it really screwy, visually. I wanted to have a reality in the drawing so when someone’s walking through it, it feels like they’re walking through something real, even if it’s something that’s impossible.
You know, obviously with ordinary rooms you try to get good two or three-point perspectives or one-point occasionally. I just did a drawing of kind of a vortex-y thing, and in that particular drawing I just did a one-point because it’s appropriate for the vortex that one-point will really cover it. I’ve done other drawings with the same thing where I actually used a two-point perspective because I wanted to pick up a little and give the reader a better idea of what the whole contraption looks like, rather than something where it’s just the energy. But there’s some stuff happening I’m working on right now where a massive amount of energy is involved and I want that the importance to that energy is in its release, and its consequence is more important than getting a good look from a long distance away. So, you know, there aren’t any right or wrong answers, exactly. Everything’s out of context. You can only just get your panels to fit together so that in the end you do the most effective job of storytelling.
Come back tomorrow for more from Walt and pre-order INDESTRUCTIBLE HULK #6 now!
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