Jill Thompson- An evolution of craft.
A look at the development of a unique artist.

Jill Thompson has been a professional comic artist for over 10 years, and her work spans a diverse array of projects and styles, from Wonder Woman, to the X-Files, to her own storybook creation "Scary Godmother". Over this amount time, any artist would mature and grow, and their style of their artwork would change to reflect this. But Jill's artwork has taken several unique and fantastic turns, and her current output shows great strides into an energetic and iconic realm, which makes for a defined contrast between her earlier work.

We're going to be examining the development and progression of her artistic style, by relating it to her other work and examining it's place in the industry, at the time. Although we won't be examining every piece of work she's done in her long career (there's just too much!), we will be touching on the more important pieces of work she's accomplished, as well as the ones which show the greatest transitional aspects of her style.

Although Jill Thompson originally began comics on the independent circuit with "Just Imagine Comix and Stories" while still in high school, it's after she graduated **artschool that she moved into the professional realm with assignments on Wonder Woman from DC Comics. Wonder Woman showed the beginnings of what I like to call the "Jill Thompson Style". Little touches like prominent noses, and expressive smile lines and defined cheekbones shine through in her work what is very much the "DC House Style" of the early 90's. Her figures are bordering on "stiff" at points throughout her work here, but there's a sensuality to her depiction of the Wonder Woman cast that prevents this from being off-putting. Wonder Woman is the work of a young artist, both in rendering and composition, but it does show some remarkable talent, especially for this early period of her career.

It's in the Sandman from DC's Vertigo imprint that Thompson comes into her own, specifically Sandman: Brief Lives. Sandman might still be some of her best-known work, and that's a testament both to it's quality and the importance of the Sandman series in modern comics. Jill Thompson has clearly evolved as an artist at this point, and uses a very gestural but controlled style on this story. It's interesting to note that the quirks Thompson continues to imbue her figure drawings with are completely evident in her work now, although somewhat unrefined still. Also worth noting is the mixed media used on some pages. The opening pages of Sandman 43, for example, show some graphite photo renderings which are quite astounding. Thompson brings Brief Lives to life with incredible vibrance and clarity, and no one is a bigger fan of her work on the book than Neil Gaiman, the Sandman creator and series writer. From an interview he gave in The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender, we can see just how much Neil enjoyed Jill's work on the book.

"Hy Bender: [Jill's] people come off as very human, visually; strong and vulnerable at the same time.
Neil Gaiman: I agree. A good example of that, by the way, is her handling of Etain of the Second Look. ... Jill also put a lot of herself into Delirium, in terms of body language, facial expressions, and so on. Jill was a terrific match for Brief Lives, and I think she did some of her very best work on it."

Thompson didn't begin her run on the Brief Lives arc though, she began one month earlier on Sandman #40, a stand-alone story entitled "The Parliament of Rooks". During that issue, Jill and Neil created 'Lil Dream and 'Lil Death, which Neil describes as "doing Death and Dream as Sugar and Spike", based on an old children's comic that DC published. The result was two cuddly little manga versions of the Sandman characters, and they created something of a sensation at the time. It can be argued that their appearance is responsible for some of the "cuddlier" character icons in the Goth community, everything from Jhonen Vasquez's "Squee" to the perky little vampire children that adorn T-Shirts from companies too numerous to mention.

Jill's foray into simplified, cute drawings also resonates with her later work on Scary Godmother. In another interview in "The Sandman Companion", Jill describes the research behind the science of cute. "..I have a 'Hello, Kitty' alarm clock, and it's the cutest thing on the planet; so I studied it to find out why. I noticed that it has a huge head with big eyes, but its face is all the way down the lower third of its head. I then realized that kittens and puppies, and human babies, all have their faces smashed down the bottom of their heads; and their faces grow up into their heads as they get older." She puts this research to good use later in here career on the Scary Godmother books.

Jill's next high-profile assignment was anything but cute. Jill moved onto another prominent Vertigo series after Sandman, the then recently launched Invisibles. Dealing with a band of misfit magical terrorists, the Invisibles provided another opportunity to show the human strengths and vulnerabilities that had won her acclaim on Sandman. However, her work began at the onset of the Invisibles' "Arcadia" arc, which is by and large considered to have decimated the sales of the fledgling title. Dealing with very graphic examples of torture, sadism, rape and murder, the work was a very disturbing journey through the works of the Marquis de Sade, and as such a number of readers dropped the book during Jill's run. It's unfortunate, because Jill's work really shone despite, or perhaps, because of the subject matter. As Jill described in this month's ProFile interview, because the editorial team on the book determined that much of what was happening in the story couldn't be printed in a Vertigo book, Jill had the task of drawing the obscene, without making her art obscene. She succeeded very admirably in many respects, by obscuring specific details and posing characters to minimize their "offensive" nature, but at the same time leaving enough visual clues and suggestive shadows to easily infer what was really happening, thus serving the story well and meeting editorial requirements. Despite this, some last minute re-draws were requested so that all of the genitalia on the corpses was obscured by underwear. Yes, a female corpse, during the time of the French Revolution, is seen wearing g-string panties (whilst being graphically eaten by creepy bug-men). It's unfortunate that this sort of thing happens, particularly with artists as talented as Thompson because I feel it denigrates the integrity of the artwork for someone in the art department to put boxer-shorts on a male corpse to cover up a penis. Something to consider while reading this story. Despite a few editorial glitches, Jill illustrated some very difficult subject matter expertly, and that could be a lesson to a few of the "more is more" artists working in the industry today.

At this point in her career, Jill didn't really tackle any longer projects, instead opting to do several short arcs on established series. This choice sort of backfired on her, because the comic book industry sort of fell apart right around this time and even established comics professionals were having a much harder time finding work. Consequently, there really wasn't a whole lot of material from Jill between the end of her first Invisibles run in March 1995, and the first Scary Godmother storybook in September 1997. Although she completed the three issue "She-Male" arc for Invisibles during this time, her work was mostly outside of DC Comics. Jill worked on Mike Baron's The Badger for Dark Horse comics, and did a few one-off stories for Caliber comics including an 8 page The Lost story that ran in Calibrations #1. Her art here very much followed the style set in her Invisibles work, although because the new projects were black and white, the linework tightened and became much more evocative in it's use of brush strokes and solid blacks. Also, Jill's storytelling became more inventive, possibly because of the artistic freedom that working for a smaller publisher entails.

During this time, Jill was also contracted to produce an original Graphic Novel for Topps Comics, based on the popular X-Files television program. As an admitted fan of the show, the high profile of the project and the decent page rate it provided, it looked to be a very good opportunity to improve her cache in the industry, and move into the mainstream. It's safe to say however, that when X-Files: Afterflight came out it wasn't exactly what anyone was hoping for.

Jill produced the entire book in pencils and inks from start to finish, but the licensing people weren't happy with the likenesses of Gillian Anderson and David Duchovney, the actors who portrayed the two lead characters on the television show. Despite numerous re-draws of their likenesses (down to actually tracing them from photographs), all of the faces in the book ended up being re-drawn by a different artist, and Jill is only credited with doing "breakdowns" on the project. Jill has mentioned that this experience more or less pushed her into creating her own work, which isn't terribly surprising.

Jill's last freelance project before creating Scary Godmother was a 4-issue fill-in arc on the Vertigo series Seekers: Into the Mystery. As the artist on issues 11-14 of the book, she had to approach some very serious subject matter, and it's interesting to note that her work here is the clearest transition between the controlled dynamicisim of The Invisibles and the abstracted simplification of Scary Godmother. Seekers still looks like signature Thompson work, her characters are immediately recognizable thanks to their strong body-language and prominent noses and cheeks. But there's a manic quality to the work, an illustrated, kinetic feeling to her lines that was always present previously, although definitely in a diminished capacity. It's a refreshing change and well-suited to the story. Cute little demons litter the pages, and the nonsensical babblings and erratic movement of several of the characters are perfectly suited to the excited linework Thompson provides.

Which brings us to the Scary Godmother. Jill's first (to my knowledge) fully-painted artwork, the first Scary Godmother book was a 40 page hardcover children's book that mixed contemporary comic storytelling (panels and word balloons) with traditional children's storytelling (invisible narrator, hardcover book format). The result was a unique project that combined the best of both formats, and brought out the best in Jill's work. The characters are much more animated and lively, always in motion. Also, because some of the characters are of a more fantastic nature, there've are some artistic tricks taking place that are only possible in this type of story; Characters smiles extend off the sides of their faces, mouths and eyes take on dimensions not possible in nature, and almost Peanuts-like adults' faces are hardly ever shown, and even then obscured by objects or shadows. The Scary Godmother world is a world seen through the eyes of children, and as such there are no right-angles, and everything is more cartoony and colourful. Although I do have some issues with the art, such as the heavy hand used on the painting and choice of colours, Scary Godmother is a very auspicious debut to the series.

There have been two further Scary Godmother painted hardcover books released, Scary Godmother: Revenge of Jimmy and Scary Godmother: The Mystery Date. Both show Jill's growing comfortability working with watercolors and her new art style, and that perhaps can be attributed to her working in the Scary Godmother style on all of her new projects. In between the painted Scary Godmother books, Jill has released 2 black and white one shot Scary Godmother projects. Both are illustrated entirely in comic-book format, and deal with developing the characterization of the cast of the Scary Godmother books. The pen and ink work of these stories compliment the painted work of the hardcover books nicely, and actually improve upon the storytelling aspects. Because the stories are aimed at a slightly older audience and are not integrating the children's book format, the layouts are incredibly inventive, including double-page spreads where you follow the story via a series of dashes indicating motion, along the lines of one of those Family Circus Sunday cartoon strips where we see little Billy tearing through a cut-away diagram of the house. Really neat stuff, and something that I personally would like to see carried over to the big books.

As I mentioned, Jill has carried over her new artistic style to all of her current projects. The end of 1999 saw a new Vertigo series illustrated by Jill called "Finals". This four-issue limited series was set in a world only slightly removed from our own, and focussed on a group of high-school seniors developing their lethal (and slightly insane) final exam projects. Although the series was full of tongue-in-cheek dark humour, it did exist mainly in the "real world", and as a result you might have expected a return to Jill's tighter, more reserved Vertigo work. But no, Finals is filled with Ms. Thompson's manic and expressive new style, and it hasn't been toned down at all for this new series. In fact, it's cartoony nature belies the very creepy goings on in a way that a more realistic style wouldn't be able to, and it does a strong service to the story because of it. In fact, you're so accustomed to seeing the horrible goings on in Finals as "wacky" that the ending hits you like a 2x4. An artist who drew in a more realistic or serious tone wouldn't have been able to achieve that.

Coming nearly full-circle, Jill has returned to the Invisibles as the series draws to a close. Along with a plethora of other artists, Jill is illustrating a few pages per issue of the last four issues of the series (4, 3, 2, and 1), and in a very deliberate wink to long-time readers, Jill draws a scene that echoes strongly to her earliest work on the series. The Invisibles team sitting in a Chinese restaurant eating an extravagant meal and drinking champagne. Comparing the two panels above side-by-side, it's astounding to see just how far Jill's work has progressed, and to be honest, how different it looks. But despite the advances, it's also interesting to note the similarities in the work. The little bits that still mark the illustrative style of Jill Thompson as unique. Gone are King Mob's long eyelashes and defined cheekbones. Gone is the cross-hatching, in favour of a liberal use of solid black areas. Gone is the stiffness and hard angles of the chairs and tables that make up the restaurant, instead replaced by expressive curved lines creating an almost fish-eye perspective.

But, is either style better than the other? Does the refined and elegant earlier work overshadow the expressive, though less-rendered work she's doing now? Usually, when an artist moves towards simplicity and expressiveness in their linework, it's seen as a step backward. But no, I think Jill's style has developed into something gorgeous, and though I've said it many times, unique. Not unlike the character she draws on the page, Jill and her art have grown and are now something different. King Mob's rubber fetish-gear and over-sized nipple rings have given way to black-on-black suits and ties. Growth and Change abound.

Looking back at Jill Thompson's body of work it's very difficult to see where she'll go next with her art. For someone that's illustrated projects all over the map (and that's difficult to say of many artists in the superhero-dominated world of comics), Jill's work has retained an exclusivity and personality that you can't find in anyone else working in the medium. For now, Jill is continuing to work on her Scary Godmother creation. Her upcoming Scary Godmother: Wild About Harry" mini-series from Sirius shows further development of her iconic style, and she hints in our Interview this month that a return to her early Wonder Woman style might show up on some of her work for Chaos! Comics. Wherever she travels creatively though, I for one will be along for the ride.

Christopher Butcher is Columns Editor of PopImage.

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