Posted in: Comics | Tagged: artists alley, Comics, new york comic con, NYCC

Talking To Cliff Chiang, Garbiel Hardman And Jason Latour

Published Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:00:38 -0500

Josh Kopin has been talking to some of his favourite artists on Artists Alley at New York Comic Con…

Cliff Chiang

JK: I was wondering how you like drawing Wonder Woman?

CC: It's great. We've been give a lot of creative freedom with it, to be able to take it in this direction has been a lot of fun.

JK: What are you guys doing with all that creative freedom?

CC: Well, we're just trying to tell good stories in a way that people aren't expecting from Wonder Woman. There's a lot of preconceptions about what a Wonder Woman story is, and we're trying to blast through that.

JK: is there a way that your Wonder Woman is different than the way she has been approached in the past?

CC: I think other people have also done this, but that there's more eyes on it now. I think we're trying to do a very straight forward Wonder Woman, that isn't tied up in backstory, and just present her as a very straight forward warrior.

JK: Do you have anything other than Wonder Woman going on right now?

CC: No, Wonder Woman is taking up all my time.

Gabriel Hardman

JK: First, could you talk a little bit about how you ended up on Secret Avengers?

GH: I got a call from Lauren Sankovitch, who had been the associate editor on Agents of Atlas, which I drew a couple years ago, and she's great, and I had worked with Rick Remender briefly on Doctor Voodoo, I did a little flashback sequence, so we had experience working together and I was interested in the group of characters and working with Rick again, and it was as simple as that.

JK: Could you talk about how're you're approaching the new series?

GH: I'm in the process of figuring that out right now. I mean, I'm drawing the first issue, and I'm always looking for a way to ground the characters in a real world, but then have room for it to go crazy and be big and science fiction.

JK: Is there a character you're particularly excited to be drawing?

GH: I like doing Beast. There's always something interesting about characters like that, that you have to make look real and work but not, you know, look mundane. It has to be exciting and fun. So, Beast and, to some degree, Hawkeye, as well. I read West Coast Avengers when I was a kid, and some of the other characters were in other Eighties books, the New Defenders and stuff like that that I enjoyed, so there's a certain amount of familiarity and sentimental feelings about them.

JK: Can you talk a little bit about your work for Double Feature, the "The Liar" short story?

GH: Yeah. My wife and I wrote it, I drew it, and its a kind of crazy espionage thing. It's an eight-page story that you can get through the Double Feature iPad app, which has a lot of extras and extra functionality to it, you can see my process, the pencils and stuff like that, so you're getting a lot for 99 cents. We want to do at least a couple more short stories and very likely there'll be a creator owned graphic novel.

JK: Does the process feature of Double Feature make you feel exposed at all?

GH: Honestly, I don't mind it. In general, I don't like people seeing the process stuff, because I feel like it should all be sort of magic, you know? I think its better if people don't know how things are done. But the way that the Double Feature app works is so good and thorough that instead of being some half-assed sort of thumbnail printed somewhere that is out of context. This is everything in context, so you can really see the process of it. That made it feel like it was worthwhile.

Jason Latour

JK:Will you tell me a little bit about Loose Ends?

JL: Basically, as it's billed in the subtitle, it's a southern crime romance, which is to say it's a story set in North Carolina that travels throughout the Southeast. It follows what you could call a doomed romance, and it's very much in the spirit of something like True Romance or other older movies like The Intimates and non-noirs. It's very much about the execution of the story, more than a plot driven character thing.

JK: How did the book come together?

JL: It's always been a passion project of mine, I've always been interested in crime fiction. I wanted to tell something that was sort of a personal story and a genre study, and Frank Brunner was also looking to do something similarly. He's an unbelievable artist, and we became close friends and started kicking the story around, and eventually it became such a large part of our lives that we decided that we should hole up and actually do it.

JK: Does being an artist as well as a writer change the way that you write for someone else?

JL: Certainly. I think that it gives me, maybe not a better understanding but a more personal understanding of what he's doing, and what its like to have to sit and toil away at a page. I know firsthand what kind of problems sort of rear their head in the process of converting a word into an image. To some extent, I think it helps me to visualize what's going to go into a script as well as when to let go. Other than that, its more or less the same job as any other writer.

JK: Anything else coming up the pipe?

JL: Art-wise, it was announced today that I'm doing a two issue B.P.R.D mini series, it's Scott Allie and Mike Mignola, with Dave Stewart coloring and I'm also doing an X-Force one-shot with Ivan Brandon, and Enrico Renzi is coloring that.

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