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Comics 101
Art tips and techniques, reviews and interviews from my studio. Archived here and at World Famous Comics.

Comics 101 Archives

Comics 101 for 10/10/2002
An Interview with Berni Wrightson - Part Two (originally taken November 26th, 1994 at Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio)

Joe: Where are you living now?

Berni Wrightson: I'm living in Socrates, New York.

J: What are some of your favorite mediums to work with?

BW: Let's see... watercolors and markers.

J: What are some of your projects your working on for the future?

BW: The next big thing is 'Batman Vs. Aliens' for Dark Horse.

J: Are you a big 'Aliens' fan?

BW: Oh, Yeah!

J: The second film was definitely one of the best films of all time.

BW: Definitely!

J: Can you give me a rundown on some of the comics you've worked on over the years?

BW: I did 'Swamp Thing', I did a shitload of covers for 'House of Mystery' and 'House of Secrets', intro pages...

(Sergio Aragones, creator of Groo and Mad magazine artist extraordinaire, comes by to say hi to Berni from the bar area.)

Sergio: Hey Berni, That is a really nice lady you have. You have your hands full. She is very clever.

BW: She's really smart, very smart.

J: Hi. Howya doing?

J: Fine thanks. How are you doing, Mr. Aragones?

Sergio: Fine. Well good night, Bernie.

BW: Good night. See ya tomorrow, Serg.

J: So... you mentioned intro pages...

BW: I didn't feel like doing comic book stories at the time. I could do enough of those (intro pages) to cover expenses for the month. At this time Mike Kaluta had moved out and I had gotten my own place. I had moved to better digs at this time. I had a two room place for two hundred dollars a month. This was just a few blocks away on 79th street. The old neighborhood was like needle row, lots of drug addicts and really nasty people. Where I moved to two blocks away was this really great, quiet, beautiful, nice Jewish neighborhood.

I freelanced around and did some work for Marvel. Back then the way it worked if you wanted a raise at DC you had to stop working there, go to Marvel and do some work for them, let DC see it, then they would ask you to come back at a five dollar per page increase. That's how you did it. You would switch back and forth at a raise of five dollars a time over a span of months. I never liked Marvel that much. I always preferred DC.

J: Are there any comic books or characters that you haven't worked on yet that you would like to?

BW: No, not really. It's all super heroes and I could really care less about super heroes.

J: I suppose the majority of the market really is focused on those kinds of books. What's the best work you have done, the work that stands out in your mind?

BW: Probably the best thing I ever did was 'Frankenstein'. It was a real labor of love. It was something I did because I wanted to. It took me about six or seven years to do all the drawings for it. I wasn't being paid for it. I did it on my own. I would sandwich it between paying work. But that was what I really wanted to do.

J: How did you go about publishing it if was more of a personal project?

BW: When all the drawings were done I approached Jim Shooter at Marvel in 1981. He took it on because at the time Marvel was trying to get their graphic novels into bookstores and they saw 'Frankenstein' as their foot in their in the door. But it never happened. It never really got out of the comic book stores.

Mead did a hardcover version of it that was a real low print run, like 15,000 copies which was in the book stores, and that sold out immediately. They never followed up on it (with a second printing) and I don't know why.

J: Yeah, I know people who would steal a copy from a local library just so they could own one.

BW: Oh, yeah. You can't get the first edition anymore. The original print run was like 30,000 and 6 or 7 thousand copies got destroyed in a flood at the warehouse.

Marvel was never really interested in it because of the numbers. They are used to selling things as hundreds of thousands of copies. This was a real low print run, a lot of words, not enough pictures, it was black and white, not full blazing color. Marvel stopped soliciting it for a while so the retailers thought it was out of print but it wasn't. Marvel was just sitting on these 6 or 7 thousand copies which got moldy and rotted away.

J: That's pretty sad. In 'Frankenstein', you dedicate it to Roy Krenkel.

BW: Roy was a contemporary of Frazetta's. The two of them were pals and he died right before 'Frankenstein' came out. He was a really good friend of mine and he was never as successful as Frazetta or Al Williamson. He was always kind of in the shadows.

A lot of the stuff they did for E.C. Comics, Roy helped on the backgrounds, futuristic cities and stuff. He was one of those funny old guys who loved illustration like the stuff in the 20's and 30's and he loved to draw for himself. He would do drawings of dinosaurs, ancient cities and he was a great storyteller. He was a great guy to hang around with. I just really loved him, terrific old guy.

He used to go to all the comic cons. I met him with Kaluta about the same time. Both of us just fell in love with the guy and he really liked us. He was probably in his fifties when we met him but he was like one of those ageless people. He was always like one of us, like one of the boys. He had this great attitude and he didn't seem like an old man.

J: Well, how did you begin your collaboration with Stephen King?

BW: With Stephen King I had this idea to do a calendar. I would do a picture and he would do two or three paragraphs that would go under it.

I read somewhere that he was a fan of mine and I thought maybe he would be open to a collaboration. So I get in touch with him through Chris Zavisa who did the 'Look Back' book. We talked about the calendar idea and we would do a werewolf story because the only thing you've got in common to all the months is a full moon. I think this was around 1975. It eventually turned into "Cycle of the Werewolf".

If you notice the first few chapters of 'Cycle' were very short and then they got longer and longer. Stephen says he suffers from this writer's hyperthyroid or something and the story took on a life of it's own and expanded into a book. So we kinda killed the calendar idea.

J: So what did you and Stephen do after 'Cycle' was completed?

BW: Either before or after, I can't really remember, we did 'Creepshow'. That came about because they talked about a comic book tie-in to the movie since the movie was about a comic book. Somebody made the assumption that Jack Kamen, who did the cover of the 'Creepshow' book, was going to do the whole book. He actually just did the freeze-frame panels that were in the movie but somebody assumed he was going to do the whole book.

It got down to the point where they had three months to go before the book was due out to coincide with the movie and somebody said we better call Jack and see how it's going. They called him up and he said 'what comic book?' so Stephen called me and said you could really get me out of a hole here.

So I agreed to do it and went to Pittsburgh for about a week, hung out on the set. I got to see Stephen do his segment of the movie and hung out with him, George Romero, Tom Savini, and we just had a good time. It was the first time Stephen and I had spent some time together. We would sit around and talk about movies we seen, books we read, we talked about our wives, and we went to see "The Boogins" together.

J: What did you think of the movie 'Silver Bullet' (the movie adaption of 'Cycle of the Werewolf')?

BW: I liked it. I thought they did a pretty good job with it.

J: You also did some monster designs for both 'Ghostbuster' movies. Did Ivan Reitman approach you for that?

BW: No, it was Michael Gross who was associate producer for both films. Years before he was the art director at the National Lampoon and I did some work there for him. I really enjoyed working there for him. I always liked his approach to the humor of Lampoon because instead of finding some commercial artist to parody something that you want, go find the person who actually does the stuff and tell him/her it's a joke so they can parody it themselves. Which worked out great because most people have a sense of humor about what they do.

I got to know Michael there and years later he goes to Hollywood and becomes a producer and remembers the guy who draws crazy monsters and calls me.

J: Are there any other movies you've worked on that I may not know about?

BW: Yeah, I did some work on this obscure thing called 'My Demon Lover' with Scott Valentine. I worked with the makeup guys on that. One of the makeup guys I worked with was Carl Fullerton who eventually went on to be nominated for an Oscar for 'Remo Williams'. He did the prosthetic makeup on Joel Grey to make him look Asian. He actually invented this movable Asian eyelid piece, very involved, delicate stuff. John Caglione and I think Doug Drexler actually won an Oscar for their makeup on Dick Tracy. I had a lot of fun working with those guys.

J: I read somewhere that Frank Darabont, the screenwriter for Brannagh's 'Frankenstein' was inspired by your book illustrations.

BW: Yes, he did use the illustrations as a springboard.

J: I wonder how far that carried over to Kenneth Brannagh's interpretation of the script?

BW: Kenneth says that sets were very much influenced by my illustrations but I couldn't see it really. It's just not the way I would of done it. I thought it was like a two hour music video without the music. And I didn't like the makeup on Deniro either. It looked like he was in a bad accident. I liked 'Dracula' more actually. I thought it was so overdone that it was fun.

J: Well, it looks like I ran outta questions. Thank you for taking the time out for this interview.

BW: Oh, yeah, sure. I hope it's what you needed.

J: Oh, it's definitely more than what I needed. Thank you, Berni.

BW: You're welcome!

I hope everyone enjoyed my conversation with Berni from days gone by. If you'd like to learn more about his early career from his friend, fellow comic book artist Mike Kaluta (The Shadow, Books of Magic, Vampirella), check out this great interview here at Mike's official site, www.Kaluta.com.

See ya next week for a new Comics 101 feature!

-Joe

<< 10/03/2002 | 10/10/2002 | 10/17/2002 >>

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