Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, eccc, entertainment, fables, Mark Buckingham

ECCC '14: Mark Buckingham on the End of Fables

Published Wed, 02 Apr 2014 14:00:43 -0500

Gavin Lees writes for Bleeding Cool:

For the last twelve years, Mark Buckingham has been the definitive artist on Vertigo's Fables series. Although not the series' first artist, he has made the world and its characters as much his as Bill Willingham's. Following some announcements at the West Coast Fables Panel at Emerald City Comicon, I caught up with Mark to get his thoughts on the end of this project, and starting a new branch of his career.

Gavin Lees: The big news with Fables right now is that it is ending next year with issue 150. First of all, how are you feeling about such a long-running project coming to an end?

Mark Buckingham: Pretty melancholy, to be honest. I've been so attached to this book — devoted to it — for 12 years now, and I feel very invested in all the characters, and it's going to be very difficult to say goodbye to them. But I also acknowledge the fact that we have spent longer as a consistent team, creating a book than most of the people out there. Maybe Robert [Kirkman] and Charlie [Adlard] doing The Walking Dead and one or two other examples, but it's pretty rare for a team like ours to stay together and just keep going month after month. There was bound to come a moment where it come the right point to say goodbye. As Bill [Willingham] was developing his ideas for this next big epic tale, it really became clear to us that we had become full circle and we were telling the last big story that we wanted to tell, that went right back to the core of the relationship between Snow and Rose, that was right at the forefront of the very first tale we told. So, it seemed like the right moment to bring everything together and to wrap things up. We're going to do it in style, though. We're doing it over 10 months, and the final issue is 150 pages long, so we're basically giving everyone a graphic novel for a final issue. It's going to be something very special, and we're going to do our best to let you know what happens to the most popular characters in the series.

GL: Is that last issue going to be all your art?

MB: No, the way it's going to work is that there's going to be major story in there by me, and the final epilogue of the book will be me as well. For the remainder of it, we're going to have lots of short stories that will be the final story of each of those characters that we've been exploring over the run. We're also, in fact, every month in the run-up to that last issue, we're going to have a back-up story, which will be a guest artist and drawing the final story of certain characters along the way. Those ones that aren't directly involved in our final big story, we want to give the readers a chance to say goodbye to them.

GL: Are there any characters whose end you're anticipating? Anyone you can't wait to get rid of?

MB: To be honest, I've already got rid of the ones I didn't like. I couldn't wait to get rid of Jack, so I managed to come up with a very good way of Bill giving him his own series. Prince Charming was another one that I was not that enamoured of, buy the irony is that in those last couple of issues in the run up to him leaving the series with the Great War, I started to really love the character, and wondered, "Do I have to do this to him now?" That's sort of been the way it's gone all along, to be honest. The other thing that's going to be good over this final year is that I'm taking on the role of writer myself, and I'm going to be writing the final story arc of Fairest.

GL: But not drawing it?

MB: No, I'm going to be working with Russ Braun, who is a regular collaborator with us on Fables. He did an amazing story, the Root and Branch one that was published a month or two back. I saw that story, and knew that he was the artist that I wanted to collaborate with on this tale. It's a story set at the Farm, and it's going to focus on those animal characters who we've seen racing around in the stories, but we've never really spent a lot of time with, and they're my favourite parts of the series. I mean, the first arc I drew of Fables was "Animal Farm" and I invested so much in developing that setting and those characters that I really wanted it to be the story I told when I finally took on the writing role. That allows us, with the pages of Fairest alongside Fables to expand the opportunity to say goodbye to as much of the cast as we can.

GL: Have you started writing those scripts?

MB: I have! It's already underway.

GL: Is this your first script?

MB: It's my first major work. I previously wrote a prose story for Bill for Fables #100, and I more of less write the Merv Pumpkin head story that appeared in the House of Mystery annual. Bill came in and tidied it up to make me look good, but most of that script was mine. I've also been contributing some writing to Fables in recent issues as well. You'll have seen a writing credit for me crop up from time to time. I suppose I'm also showrunner on the Dead Boy Detectives book. Toby [Litt] and I have been working together very closely on that, and a lot of the plotting and the character development has come from me. So, I've definitely been moving in the direction of being a writer over the last couple of years, but this is my chance to have something substantial to get my teeth into.

GL: What has the process been like? Do you still have Bill to bounce ideas off — does he get final approval?

MB: Yeah, obviously Bill has to read it all and approve it. We've been talking about the story for two years — to be honest, I sold him on the title alone — "The Clamour for Glamour". He's been an extraordinary sport about it, as has Shelly Bond, and they're both eager to see how this comes out. It's going to be a lot of work, but also a huge lot of fun for me. There's an overarching story, but also each issue will have a single character come to fore, so that we have a self-contained story alongside the ongoing plot. I think it's going to be quite a rich little arc.

GL: Once Fables and the whole universe has wrapped up… I can't help but notice that you have a Marvel Man drawing on your board right now. Is that next?

MB: Yes, definitely! I'm returning to the series, Neil Gaiman is doing the scripts and I'm going to be doing the artwork. All being well, D'Israeli is joinging us as well, so we can pretty much reunite the team as it was when we were working on it before Eclipse disappeared. My hope is that we can pretty much jump straight back in, and finish the story we set out to tell. Once Fables wraps up, I have a solid year ahead of working on Miracleman.

GL: What's that going to be like for you — this is a 20-year old story, and your art has developed so much in that time. Are we going to notice a disconnect between where it ended and where it picks up again?

MB: Well, I'm hoping to be able to find a way to soften that blow. "The Golden Age" I'm leaving as a period piece — that's going to come out as it was, flaws and all. That was me as an artist, learning my craft in public. I have a lot of experimentation in that first arc where I play with a lot of styles within that story, but the intention with "The Silver Age" and "The Dark Age" was that we would move into a period where we'd be developing the story in a linear fashion, with a single narrative, and for that I wanted to have more consistency. Even back then, issue 23 looked very different from issue 24 and the unpublished issue 25 is very different again. So, my intention is to go back to those issues to, as it were, remaster them by taking each page and seeing what can be done to re-ink and refine the look, so that I can create something more consistent, that will also have a flavor of where I am now. When we move on into the new, what you'll get is a consistent read through the entire arc. That's the plan, anyway!

GL: After that, do you think you might have a future as a writer only?

MB: My intent is to be a writer/artist, to be a creator in my own right of my own material. In many ways this is part of that learning curve, of me developing that skillset, so that when I do take on some of my own ideas and bring them to life, I'm doing so with the confidence that I understand all aspects of the job. I want people who see my name attached to a book on the writing as well as the art side, that they're reassured that I know what I'm doing. That's part of the reason why I'm not drawing the Fairest arc, is that I wanted to have only the writer hat on, so that I could only focus on that part of the craft and also get some good experience of collaborating with another artist from that side of the fence. Russ is such a wonderful artist and such a really nice guy, I have the confidence that working with him will be a good experience.

I've written for other people a little bit in the past. I wrote a short story for Victor Santos, the artist of Mice Templar, for his Los reyes elfos — The Elf King — series that he does in Spain. I wrote a story for him while I was living in Spain, so that was a useful bit of experience, but again what's going to be nice is to get away from short stories to something that has many twists and turns, and a chance for me to develop some interesting story ideas.

Gavin Lees writes for Bleeding Cool Magazine and assorted other publications. He lives in Seattle.

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