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INTERVIEW: TED NAIFEH AND THE NIGHT THINGS San Fran boy Ted Naifeh has been working in the biz for over a decade, working on such titles as GLOOMCOOKIE and NOCTURNALS, as well as video game design and illustration work, Ted has certainly reached a point where he is in his prime. Even with several projects on the burner, Ted took the time to talk to us about his career and his new project COURTNEY CRUMRIN AND THE NIGHT THINGS which comes out this March from Oni Press. This new series follows a little girl named Courtney who is transplanted from her city neighborhood to a PopImage: With over a decade of experience in the biz you've accumulated a large range of credits and have worked in many mediums and styles. It's evident that you've studied art and architecture in detail, so I'm curious where your training lies? Ted: Mainly in illustration. Formal education was something I dabbled in, taking several college courses, but I never got a degree. I was focused on learning to draw comics, and most art college courses don't directly pertain to that field. Your credits include a variety of venues, from video game design to illustration, and yet you seem to have made your home with comics. Any particular reason you've chosen comics over working on films or commercial art? What I came to realize working in video games, card games, and from what I know of movies, it's just not rewarding enough. I love the work of comics; I love drawing every stitch of clothing, every expression, every brick in every building, every line on every page. I don't always remember that I love it, especially when under deadline, but I do. When you work in most other media, movies, videogames etc, you get to do one aspect of the work, like the sets, or costume design, or maybe the look of a monster of two. You don't get to do it all. And generally there's someone in charge making the actual decisions, and you just carry them out, realizing someone else's vision. I could get into that sort of position, but then I'd just be delegating tasks to others instead of doing the actual work myself. With comics, I can think up an idea for a story, design the characters and the settings, and see it all come out the way I want it by doing the work myself instead of hiring others to do it for me. It's just more satisfying. That's something ONI specializes in. They have a partner company that takes the comics properties and sells them to television and movie studios. They mentioned that they wanted to show Courtney to the Jim Henson Company, which is currently doing Farscape for the Sci-Fi channel. Personally I'd love to see them handle Courtney using puppetry. Labyrinth is one of my very favourite movies, so as you can imagine, this would be a dream come true for me. With David Bowie as Uncle Aloysius! On the other hand, I didn't get into comics as a stepping-stone to movies or television, so I wouldn't want to get too involved in that end of things. I'd prefer to take any money they offer for the property rights, and just go on doing comics, if it's all the same. I fantasize about getting into film sometimes, but in reality I'd probably dislike it. I'm better at working with pen and ink than people. In other media I've seen really great ideas get so mired by marketers second-guessing the audience that they lose the original intent entirely. I've watched it happen in the games industry. In comics there's less money at stake, less worry about tooling a project to please the audience, and therefore less interference and more freedom to take the ideas further and do unique and innovative things. I can have complete control, and make decisions to please myself alone. Call me a megalomaniac if you like. I notice your art changes with each project you've taken on, from NOCTURNALS, to MACHINE and currently with COURTNEY CRUMRIN. Do you decide on the style of the book based on how you think it should be seen or do you try and bend your style to what look would be most befitting of the book? I never put that much thought into it till I did GLOOMCOOKIE, which needed to look more cartoonish. That style freed me up to explore simpler ways of getting images across and I think my subsequent work has benefited from it. Right now I'm working on a Star Wars book, and the look must obviously be much more realistic than GLOOMCOOKIE. But having worked out a style where I basically stripped out all but the most essential elements, I now feel much more confident to insert detail where it really counts, instead of overworking the art in ways that wouldn't even get noticed, and taking forever to do it. Your paintings are great, but I don't see them that often. Do you still do paintings when you have the time or do you mainly reserve that time for commissioned works now? The paintings were mainly done for Magic cards and other role-playing game cards. I'd love to do more painting, but there's not a lot of work in it, and I don't really have much time to do it for pleasure. If only I didn't have this habit of sleeping eight hours a day. Alas. Where do you find you draw the majority of your influences from? In keeping with the 'dark' and 'spooky', I imagine characters such as Edgar Allen Poe and Marilyn Manson play an occasional role. Poe, Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley. The list goes on. Marilyn Manson is delicious. He transgresses gender, and blurs the lines between the beautiful and the grotesque. I wish more performers did that kind of thing. I also love illustrators like Dave McKean and Yoshitaka Amano, whose non-comic backgrounds give their comic work an amazing uniqueness. While neither of them would be considered "dark" or "spooky", those elements are in their work and give it resonance. Do you prefer to create or work with characters with a bit of androgyny inherent in their personalities and characterization? As often as I can get away with it. I've always liked that stuff. I remember picking up Jon Muth's Dracula GN, chiefly done in watercolor, and being quite spellbound at his effeminate depiction of Dracula. Then there was Mike Dringenberg's take on Sandman, and Chris Claremont's multiple butch girl characters. Androgyny permeates comics in a subtle way, as it permeates most media. It's just something I like. One of my favorite characters to draw in GLOOMCOOKIE was Max, the tall lanky boy that always wore skirts and heavy lipstick. When did you first express interest in the spooky and magical? The strange and bizarre? When I was a kid I was quite taken with Bauhaus (the band, not the design movement. I wasn't THAT cool). Their esthetic was fascinating. The stark, cruel effeminate beauty of lead singer Peter Murphy took my breath away. I've broadened my interests considerably since then of course, but I must admit I still have an old-school gothic streak. Many of my old friends have given it up entirely, mostly out of embarrassment, but I think that's just silly. Everything interesting has a bit of darkness to it. Not really. I've always been more on the rock & roll side of the goth world. I loved Dead Can Dance when they first appeared and bought several of their early albums, but I almost feel that they were the worst thing that could have happened to goth music. Say what you like about the staggering pretensions of bands like Bauhaus, Souxsie and the Banshees, and (especially) The Sisters of Mercy, they're all pretty darned rock and roll. Now days the scene's more about velvet and embroidered waistcoats and Vampire: The Masquerade. And as much as I find that stuff enjoyable, it's not so much my thing as the earlier stuff. These days I'm more about retro glam, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, that sort of thing. I'm even dreaming up a comic-book in that vein. That could make quite a few people very happy. Not yet. I'd love to do one, but I think I should wait till I have a larger fan base, and my involvement will be more attractive to Dan Brereton's audience and less of a drawback. Not that they didn't seem to like the book, but there was less enthusiasm for it than for books that Dan paints himself, for obvious reasons. I'm hoping (arrogantly perhaps) that this won't always be the case, and that people will some day be just as interested in a NOCTURNALS book drawn by myself as one drawn by him. Now that you're involved with ONI, do you plan on bringing your other properties such as EVA: IRON KITTEN, HOW LOATHSOME and NICKI SHADOW to print anytime soon? Oni has been great. I can't wait to start negotiating other projects with them. Right now we're waiting to see how well Courtney Crumrin is received before we talk about other things. Iron Kitten was the first thing that I submitted, but they had several other "bad-ass chick" comics already, and my proposal seemed redundant to their lineup. Courtney on the other hand was unlike anything else they've done, and since they liked it immediately they went ahead and took it on. They might be interested in Iron Kitten later on, but if not, that's fine too. I've got lots of other ideas. What can you tell us about these projects respectively? Eva: Iron Kitten is kind of a science fiction Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing, where the main character is secretly a deep-cover cyber-warrior disguised as a high-school student. It's totally slapstick (even more so than Buffy). How Loathsome is my take on the autobiographical underground comic. I've read several of these and found them often entertaining, but occasionally self-indulgent. I thought about the kind of person whose autobiography I'd like to read, and came up with Catherine Gore; a gender-questioning, semi-gothic writer whose strange lifestyle and disreputable friends provide various entertaining stories. Having come up with the premise, I realized that I wasn't really up to the task of writing such exotic material, so I enlisted the help of my own disreputable friend Tristan, who reads more of this kind of writing than I. Nicki Shadow is a straight-up cyberpunk series about teen-aged cyber-hacker street gangs, straight out of William Gibson. I drew the series several years ago and the first two issues were self- published by the writer. The whole book is done and we're hoping that Oni will want to pick it up and maybe do a Trade Paperback. I'm still very proud of that series, and feel it's one of the best books I've ever worked on. In the meantime you're ALSO working on a STAR WARS graphic novel for Dark Horse. Can you tell us about this? Has an expected release date been set? It should be out in February. It's a spin-off series about two characters from Episode 2, Jango Fett, Father of Boba Fett, and Zam Wesell. They're bounty-hunters, and in the story they get wind of a plot by this rogue general to destroy Corescant with a bomb that, unfortunately, Jango himself had inadvertently supplied on another job. I could tell you more, but the Lucasfilm people would eliminate us both. Ha! Bring it on Boba Fett! I'll feed your ass to some, weird lizard thing or... some other geeky fanboy reference. He was always my favorite character from Empire. I felt a bit cheated (as did most people I think) at his pathetic end in Jedi. I'm glad to see the character being re-addressed in Clones. And I'm thrilled to be drawing the costume for this GN. The Clones costume is even cooler than the original. Do you think that with the recent success of shows such as Buffy, and increased interest in the Indiana Jones style adventures and the appeal of the mystery of shadows, that a book such as COURTNEY CRUMRIN has a steady niche in the market? Could you introduce us to the cast of THE NIGHT THINGS? Well, there's Courtney Crumrin, the main character. She's based a bit off of Matilda, or Harry Potter, the kind of miserable protagonist with a tragic home-life that's about to have her ordinary world burst open. But I always thought that it was a little ridiculous that these sweet, wonderful children would come from such wretched families, so I decided that Courtney would carry the scars of her home life. She's sullen and grouchy, and doesn't tend to get along with other children. She's very negative, but in a way that rings true to life and makes one relate to her. She's a character that's used to disappointment, and she doesn't know quite how to react when things start going her way. Courtney's Uncle Aloysius Crumrin is her doorway into the world of the Night Things. He has invited Courtney's parents to live with him in his mansion under the pretext of needing someone to look after him in his old age. But in reality he needs them to provide the neighborhood a distraction from his peculiar behavior. He's a Warlock, a prominent member of a magical society, and also the foremost authority on The Night Things. He also is sullen and grouchy, but is extremely fond of Courtney, and takes an interest in her development as a user of witchcraft. Then there are the Night Things themselves in their various forms. Some are small and harmless, like the ones that dwell in Aloysius' house. Some are more dangerous, like the goblin that haunts the nearby wood, catching and eating any children foolish enough to stray in. Some have magical properties that are of value to witches. Some are kept as pets, some trade their skills for things only witches can provide. As Courtney learns more and more about the Night Things, she begins to feel more at home among them than either her classmates or her fellow witches. To find out more, fans can read the online mini-comic at The Night Things.com. How often is your work influenced by your own childhood? Almost always, I guess. Frequently. I don't think I would have taken much interest in How Loathsome as a kid, but mostly I try to stop and assess the direction in which my artwork is heading and say to myself, "What would you have thought of this stuff at fifteen when you were looking at Frank Miller and Jon Totleben and Moebius? What was your criteria then?" Or I'll look over a story idea like Courtney Crumrin and think, "Would you have read this at, say eleven? Or fifteen? Or even twenty?" Sometimes the closest thing we can get to an objective opinion is to step out of ourselves as we are and be someone we once were again. In the recent solicitation for COURTNEY CRUMRIN your style is expressed as having the best to offer from both the pre and post Mike Mignola eras, is this a comment on your style as relating to Mignola or did you ever have any experience working with Mike? I've never worked with Mike. I suppose the influence is obvious, so I might as well address it. The funny thing is that I didn't like Mike's work at all when I first saw it in Cosmic Odyssey. It was Gotham By Gaslight that first grabbed my interest (inked beautifully by P. Craig Russell and gorgeously colored). Are there any projects you'd like to do with someone else handling the art chores? Never really thought about it. It would be nice to at some point be hired strictly for my writing skills, but I think that's a long way off yet. I would like to have Dan Brereton draw something that I write, since we have so similar an esthetic. Most people can't go to a convention without coming back with a strange story or too, but considering you're now working with ONI and the appeal of your work to fans who veer on the books of a bleaker variety, you must have met some interesting people by now. Sadly, most of the fans of my spooky work are pretty normal, garden-variety goth comics fans. That's to say they're more or less like normal comics fans but better dressed. Unlike Neil Gaiman or Jhonan Vasquez, I've never had discussions with fans about how becoming a vampire might reverse gender reassignment surgery, and I've never received dead squirrels or human hair as a gift. But I'm still hopeful. People giving you dead things is not as fun as you might think. Have you found that having a website and interacting with fans through the net has at all affected or influenced your work? It's made me feel more confident to have so much positive feedback. I get an e-mail at least once a week from people who either miss my work on GLOOMCOOKIE or are just discovering it. It's a nice feeling. What advice, if any, would you give to those trying to make it in the Biz today? My other advice is this: don't rely on comic art or comic writing as your soul influence. Explore other kinds of art and other kinds of writing. Get education, or educate yourself. Don't go into the biz thinking, "I want to do it too", go in thinking, "I want to do it different; I want to do it better." In other words, don't be a clone of your favorite artist. Have something new to offer, something worth giving back into the medium that you love. And finally - plug time. Plug everything and anything your heart desires... followed by a dirty limerick. Since I've already plugged all my stuff, I'll just say that I think everyone should go out and rent Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's my favorite movie this year, possibly one of my top ten films. Got this from Nerve.com by someone named Ethan Coen. Dunno if it's the same one. In the dark, the girl's innocent chum Thanks Ted. For more of Ted's work and tons of preview pages for upcoming works visit Ted's site @ Ted Naifeh.com. |
spooky old house in a rich suburb, to live in the home of her great uncle Aloysius. Her parents, delighted with their new home and its superior social status, are oblivious to Uncle Aloysius's bizarre nature. Only Courtney is aware of the unnatural goings on in the house, and indeed throughout the neighborhood. She soon learns that Aloysius is a warlock, a member of a coven of mystics, and through the old house many peculiar persons come and go, though not by the front door. Little by little she discovers her own talents in witchcraft, using it to deal with the frequent troubles that beset her in this strange, shadowy world she has discovered. 
So would you ever consider bringing any of your properties to another medium? For instance, COURTNEY CRUMRIN may make an interesting animated series. 
I'm working on other creator-owned projects besides Courtney, and I may paint covers for some of them. It really depends on how well received Courtney is and how much license I'll get for my future projects, and also how much free time I'll have to practice the craft. 
Eva is very obviously a robot, although no-one seems to notice, seeing only this superficially perfect statuesque beauty. It's basically my own take on the Japanese manga style. 
I'd like to think so. The thing about spooky books is that they attract attention from a certain market that other genres don't. But just because the Sandman/Buffy/Jhonan Vasquez fans notice it, doesn't mean they'll automatically buy it. In the end it'll have to sink or swim on it's own merits. I think the series is pretty well written, but whether it resonates with people the way Buffy does, or JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC, or GLOOMCOOKIE for that matter, remains to be seen. 
You got to love the work. Comics are a labor of love, and if you go into it thinking it's going to be a steady paycheck, you're going to be disappointed. I've never expected comics to pay my rent, so when they do I'm always pleasantly surprised. 
