Trevor Hogg chats with Douglas Wolk and Ulises Farinas about bringing the swift justice of Judge Dredd to the West Coast…
| Douglas Wolk |
“My grandmother was an incredible painter, and my father sculpted on the weekends for many years and recently took it up again,” states Douglas Wolk who is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. “Sadly, I didn’t inherit their aptitude for visual art.” Comic books were initially a childhood fascination. “I started reading them in earnest when I was 9, although I’d probably read a bunch before that and never stopped.” Blockbuster success at the box office has had an impact on the comic book industry. “I’ve certainly seen a lot of comics in the past 10 years or so that are clearly movie or TV pitches, which tends to make for mediocre-at-best comics. I’ve heard that some comics publishers tend to reserve at least some chunk of other-media rights even for ostensibly creator-owned work. But it’s also clear that smart comics publishers are mostly interested in making good comics, big-screen-friendly and otherwise. I mean, I can’t imagine how it’d be possible to film Sex Criminals or Hawkeye or Zombo in a way that preserves what makes them wonderful.” Wolk reveals, “Favourite comic book would probably be Finder, but ask me tomorrow and I’ll say something different. As for favourite comic book movie I’ll say Ghost World [2001].”
“My parents are both immigrants from Cuba,” explains illustrator, cartoonist and writer Ulises Farinas who like his creative collaborator Douglas Wolk lives in Portland, Oregon. “My mother was a history professor and my dad just figured out how to make a living any way he could. One thing I feel lucky to have had, was that despite being pretty poor and all the crap that goes along with that, my parents always encouraged us to read and pursue the arts. If you’re always going to struggle, there are some extremely valuable things that are still free in life. An ability to appreciate and learn from the arts and be educated doesn’t need a college degree or anything fancy, just a curiosity and discipline.” The small screen served as the introduction to the world of comics for Farinas. “I think from watching TV and seeing cartoons of X-Men and Batman, made me realize they existed. But the first one I purchased was from a flea market across the street from the Rahway prison in NJ. My father also brought home a box of Archie comics once, and I’d read them a lot.” The artist observes, “Publishers are always considering the big GREEN potential of any book. Will it make money is the same question whether that’s considering movie licensing or not. It doesn’t affect the types of comics I want to draw, so I’m only concerned with my own green potential.”
| Ulises Farinas |
“I’ve been reading Judge Dredd comics since I was about 12, and I did a blog about them, “Dredd Reckoning,” for a year and a half,” states Douglas Wolk who has created a five-part miniseries Mega-City Two where Judge Dredd heads to sunny urban climate of California to become a dark cloud of justice. “I love the depth and weirdness of that world; it’s been a treat to get to explore it and add a bit to it. We’ve actually had an enormous amount of creative freedom on this project; Dredd-related comics have historically had a wide stylistic range, and it’s been fun to get to come up with a new angle on that, too. The setting is so strong and beautifully broad that you can do just about anything with it as long as you keep the characters and the details consistent.” The project has allowed a role reversal. “Well, it’s a comic book, for one thing! I’ve been a critic and journalist for a couple of decades now. I’ve written a lot about comics, but aside from a few short pieces and the odd mini, I’d never written comics before this. Now I have the bug and I want to write a lot more of them.”
“Judge Dredd has got a long history, and it’s got everything which lines up with exactly the kind of things I love to draw: vulgar, over-detailed, dirty cities and dirty people,” states Ulises Farinas. “So far I’ve only been encouraged to go even more nuts. I’m free as a bird and that bird is a flamingo!” The creative talent responsible for Mega-City has made the project an enjoyable experience. “Outside of my long-time collaboration with my co-writer Erick Freitas (Gamma, Amazing Forest), Douglas Wolk is the best collaborator in the game. Plus being able to have covers done with Owen Gieni, and colours by Ryan Hill, it’s like we’re a bunch of dudes who are slo-mo walking with an explosion going off behind us.” Visual research was conducted by the illustrator. “For most of my comics’ projects I have a few books I use often. They are the Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections books, The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher, and a few comics by Geof Darrow and Moebius. I also watched movies with a similar vibe: Fifth Element [1997], Matrix movies, Book of Eli [2010], Riddick[2013], and the Dredd movies.” Farinas believes, “Wolk’s got the brain for Dredd. Wolk knows Dredd’s history and knows what he wants to do with him in this story. I always defer to him when it comes to specific Dredd-universe questions.”
“I’ve known of Ulises’ work from when he did a [fantastic] illustration for an article I wrote for Wireda few years ago,” states Douglas Wolk. “IDW’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall suggested him for this project, and I pretty much yelped with delight. Ulises and I are in contact almost every day; he came up with a lot of the images, and ideas about how our setting works, that ended up driving the story. I write a full script, with panel descriptions and dialogue; the panel descriptions were pretty long at first, but I’m trying to take after John Wagner’s example of writing really terse panel descriptions and letting artists do their thing. As it happens, one of Ulises’ many gifts is for staging things in visually engaging ways; he knows where dropping or adding a panel or rearranging things a little will make the story stronger. After Ulises draws each issue, I tweak the script pretty extensively.” When it comes to the meeting creators of Judge Dredd, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, as well as explaining the contribution of Denton Tipton who handles the editing responsibilities, Wolk remarks, “I’ve never spoken with either Wagner or Ezquerra, although I love their work, separately and together. Denton joined the project when Ulises and I were already working on it; we got to meet up with him at Comic-Con in San Diego this past summer, and talked though our plans for all five issues. Denton has been amazingly patient with all my weird lettering requests and lawyerly point-of-continuity micro-analysis.”
“After more than 2000 episodes, the parameters of Dredd’s world are well defined,” notes Douglas Wolk. “We know an enormous amount about its culture and technology, and what is and isn’t part of it. Since it’s so internally consistent, we have to be careful not to do something that contradicts it, or could cause problems for other creators down the line. That said, I love those kinds of creative constraints, and there’s a lot of room for fun within them.” The main theme for the creative team is to have fun with the storyline as well to blow things up. “I’m sure my subconscious has been kicking up stuff that’s not clear to me yet. But it’s really about the West Coast, specifically Los Angeles, and the way it organizes power around images. One way of looking at Dredd is as a series is that it’s about the person-as-law and the city, and that’s particularly true of the stories that take him out of Mega-City One. You get to see the relationship between the state, the place and the person in those, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with that balance. Explosions are also a very important theme.”
“Creative Freedom is more about constraints than anything,” notes Ulises Farinas. “Even if you’re making the most wacky universe, there’s has to be a Theory-of-Everything. Making a few rules/laws/guidelines and then taking them to their logical conclusion is where you get the best ideas from, because they grow organically. A lot of people come up with a cool idea first, and then work backward, that’s why Star Wars sucks so badly. But if you just let your ideas come about because they are required by your story, it’s always a better thing.” Ryan Hill who looks after the colouring for Mega-City Two is a familiar collaborator. “We’ve been working on another project together, so we already got a work vibe going. ‘Bright and grimy’ is what I told him, and then just let the beast loose. Besides specific colouring decisions, like the Judge’s uniforms or cars, Ryan is free to do whatever he wants.” In regards to laying out the artwork, Farinas states, “Usually I count how many panels the page has, and just throw some boxes down on the paper. I try to mix it up from the previous pages, and adjust the panel sizes according to the importance of the panel. I don’t often try to do anything fancy. I’m satisfied with conservative grids.” The artist admits, “I don’t like to draw perspective lines, i just eyeball everything. Sometimes that’s not reliable. My solution is erasing a lot and sometimes, taking pictures of wood blocks in the correct arrangement and drawing over them on tracing paper.”
“I made myself a chart of the various through-lines, just to get a sense of when I wanted to set certain things up and when I wanted other things to reach fruition,” explains Douglas Wolk. “The five issues are each individual units; there’s a story that runs through all five, but each one has its own focus.” The external question is how to incorporate background information without bringing the action to a halt. “I try to make exposition as entertaining as possible: deliver it in a way that reads as moving the story forward, or is just fun in its own right. There are a couple of passages of Mega-City Two where I had a whole lot of information to get across in a hurry, and putting it in the form of a big musical number seemed like the most appropriate way. There are musical numbers in Judge Dredd stories sometimes. You don’t get that in a lot of other adventure comics.” Wolk observes, “I’m pretty sure there are seven or eight words of narration, total, in all of Mega-City Two; I decided at the beginning that I wanted to keep it to an absolute minimum. The key to dialogue, though, is pretty simple: read it out loud! If somebody’s voice doesn’t sound right, or if it gets stilted or draggy, that will be obvious when it comes out of your mouth. [Then you get to revise it, cut it, and revise it some more. There’s nothing wrong with tinkering.] Dredd himself also has a very specific voice, although it’s understandably changed a bit over the past 37 years’ worth of stories. Given the setting of our story, I was aiming for something a bit closer to the way he talked in the early episodes.”
“One of the things that makes Dredd work is ‘thrill-power,’ or, as former 2000 AD editor Andy Diggle famously put it, the sense that a story has been boiled down to ‘a shot glass of rocket fuel,’” says Douglas Wolk. “Adventure comics are partly driven by spectacle, and comics are not just a visual medium but a drawn medium, so I’ve been trying to construct each issue around images that will look fantastic when Ulises draws them; the story falls into place from there.” The series has been full of pleasant surprises. “The big two-page splash in the first issue is the obvious ‘wow’ moment, but pretty much every bit of character acting or piece of design Ulises comes up with is incredible. I could do nothing but fall on my back and writhe with glee when I saw his cover for #3.” When composing the covers, Ulises Farinas made an effort to avoid the ‘TOUGH DUDE LOOKING TOUGH DOING SOMETHING TOUGH’ pose cliché. “The only cover like that is the first one, and the first cover is how I got the job,” remarks Farinas. “But everything else, from the paperdolls to the final cover, were attempts to have fun with the iconic elements of Dredd. Also triangles are an easy way to make a good composition.” Wolk notes, “I have a deep and long-standing fondness for Dredd’s world, and I wanted to make something that belonged to it while being different from what we’d seen of it before.” The action comedy miniseries will not go beyond the five issue run. “Mega-City Two is pretty self-contained as a story, and I don’t currently have any plans for more. I believe IDW’s got some other Dredd projects in the hopper! This was a total blast to do, though, and I’d love to write more stories set in Dredd’s world.”
Many thanks to Douglas Wolk and Ulises Farinas for taking the time to be interviewed.
To learn more visit the official website for IDW Publishing as well as the official Twitter accounts for Douglas Wolk and Ulises Farinas.
Judge Dredd: Mega-City Two #2 arrives on February 5, 2013.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
