Spray paint at the opening of The Watchmen movie
Comic book artist and writer Dave Gibbons is the man behind the ink drawings of the original Watchmen. Collaborating with writer Alan Moore, this limited-run series published between ’86 and ’87 continues to have a supreme influence on super (and anti-) hero comics to this day.
Considered for years to be un-filmable, after many tries and fails Watchmen has finally been adapted into a blockbusting Hollywood film (albeit a very dark, 2 hour, 43 minute-long blockbusting Hollywood film). Wheel spoke to Dave about the Watchmen’s latest incarnation, the graphic novel’s enduring power and the thrill of seeing his characters literally come to life on set.
Interview by Alex Fitch
How does it feel to see your work adapted into a 3D medium? Visiting the set was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had. The idea for Watchmen took root in Alan’s head, but all the visualisations are what I saw in my head and to see it in three dimensions and actually — in the case of the Owl Ship — to stand inside it, as I have...
...it’s like being inside your own head! Yes. It’s like having a dream, because no matter where I went it all made its own, Watchmen-world sense... Everywhere on set — everywhere in the production office were images from the graphic novel, blown up maybe six foot high and everything is based on that. Things in display cases made sense, framed newspapers on the walls made sense — not only the headlines, but the stories aren’t just Greek text, they’re the actual stories in full lines in the background. They’ve changed some of the costumes, which I would expect, but the attention to detail is uncanny!
The Comedian’s costume looks exactly like it does in the comic book and the guy who plays him has just the right persona. I shook him by the hand and he slapped me on the back — just like The Comedian would! I looked at the chrome-plated Colt-45 he uses in the film and on the butt of the gun was a little plaque that says something like: “presented to Edward Blake, with grateful thanks, Richard M Nixon!” You’ll never see this on screen, but it’s there and the actor knows it’s there.
If you’d known twenty years ago that they’d be making a movie, would you have been absolutely terrified, thinking “every single coffee pot I’m drawing in the background is going to end up on screen?” I obviously had no idea then it would be made into a movie. What’s interesting is that because of the way Alan writes and the way I draw, everything in Watchmen is internally consistent, everything was planned from the ground up. We didn’t do the things you see in some comics - like when people are in a room and someone has to come in through the window and you belatedly think, “I should have drawn the window! Oh, I’ll just draw a window now...”
So I think they had a solid foundation to work on. But, yes, it would have been very intimidating to think, “I’m actually doing the blueprint for a hundred million dollar movie!”
When you’ve got scripts that you’re adapting do you think, “I might try this technique or that technique because it’s something I haven’t tried before and it might suit this particular kind of story?” Yeah. Not only the tools I use or the amount of black I put on the page, but the way the page is laid out as well. I mean, you can look at any page of Watchmen and you’re in no doubt that it’s a page of Watchmen because it’s done in that nine-panel grid, which I suggested to Alan at the beginning as a way of formalising it and using a very elementary frame to contain all the complexity.
It was the same with a graphic novel I wrote and drew called The Originals. That’s in black and white and on a different kind of grid with a different lettering style. Again, every page is unmistakeably from that book. My art for Frank Miller’s comic Martha Washington, which is a kind of wild, futuristic, scary, funny romp, was done with a much more anarchic, poster-like layout with art bleeding off the page. Watchmen wouldn’t work if it had full-page bleeds or wild panel arrangements. I’m very aware of giving everything a distinct character as far as I can.
Knowing that the art in Watchmen was going to be coloured, how did that affect you when it came to the layout of the pages and elements like the heaviness of the inking? If you don’t know who’s going to be colouring, you have to draw in a kind of defensive way — making the drawing so solid that nothing the colourist does can undermine it. You have to make the light sources very clear, making sure the line strength will hold even if the colour goes over it. I employed John [Higgins] because I knew he wouldn’t make it look like a regular American comic. We’d both been looking at a lot of European stuff which sometimes uses a much more vivid palette and sometimes a much more subdued palette...So John went for secondary colours — lots of oranges, greens and purples — while traditionally, American comics have lots of blues, reds and yellows.
One thing that’s really going to help the movie adaptation is they’ve kept to John’s palette, so the sets are saturated with oranges, purples and greens and the colour aspect of it — as much as the individual details — really makes it feel like the comic book. John should get huge credit for that!
Do you find yourself making models of the ‘set’ before drawing it? I was trained as a building surveyor so I can think in those terms, but quite often if you draw out a plan or a sketch layout, that internalises it and you don’t have to make a model.
For another thing Alan and I did together, a Superman annual story called For The Man Who Has Everything, there was a character called Mongul who’s a big, bulky, alien bad guy with this jutting brow and like a lot of comic book characters, the way he’s sometimes drawn from the side doesn’t always fit with the way he’s drawn from the front. In the iconography of comic books you can kind of accept that, but I thought, “I’m going to have to work out what this character looks like.” So I made a mould of him and once I’d made that three dimensional form, I didn’t have to look at it again.
Strangely enough, someone asked me earlier today if I see things in my mind in 3D when I draw a picture. And I actually do! When I get really involved with it, I feel like I’m moving in and out of the drawing — I’ve stepped over the edge of the picture and I’m aware of the three dimensional space.
Your collaboration on that Superman annual was the first work with Alan to be adapted into another medium — for an episode of the Justice League cartoon. That’s true. I was thrilled to see that and the guys who do the Justice League cartoon, which is Bruce Timm and other talented people like that, are excellent artists and keen to do it right. Of course they had to compress the plot tremendously and cut stuff out, but it was a real kick to hear lines of Alan’s dialogue just as he wrote them and to see picture set-ups just as I’d drawn them actually moving. It was very well animated — they really did their best to adapt the feeling of the story and its sensibilities. And we got some money for it! That was very fulfilling!
When you were drawing the original Watchmen comic did you have any idea of the cultural resonance it would have in years to come? That it would be thought of by many as the definitive superhero story? We didn’t. I don’t think you have thoughts like that with any creative thing. Alan and I just had the chance to do the sort of comic that we would really like to read. A lot of our phone conversations went on for hours and we’d be talking about the feeling we used to get from an old [Jack] Kirby comic or a particular scene from an issue of Jimmy Olsen or something like that. It was an encapsulation of everything we loved about comics; the storytelling techniques that Harvey Kurtzman used or the things that Will Eisiner did. It was our tribute to comics.
Although a lot of people characterise Watchmen as being dark and grim and a deconstruction or funeral for the superhero, it didn’t feel like that for us — and for every bleak Rorschach episode you’ve got Nite Owl in his fanboy basement, building all these wonderful gadgets. The issue where he and Laurie finally get it on is like a fanboy fantasy of getting to shag the superheroine! So, it’s a balance. That’s what we were thinking then.
Around the time it had finally been collected in a trade paperback, a guy who was painting the outside of my house stuck his head through the window and said “What is it you do?” I said “comics” and he said “I used to love comics when I was a kid” and I said, “well, this thing I’ve just done has been collected in a big fat book, would you like it?” The next morning he was late — he always used to be on time — and he said “I’m sorry I’m late Dave, it’s your fault, you shouldn’t have given me that book! I started reading it when I went to bed and didn’t stop until 3 o’clock in the morning!”
That’s something I’m particularly proud about, that it has a resonance with people who don’t necessarily read comics. I think the fact that it is a self-contained piece has given it longevity because people go into comic shops and ask, “where do I start?”
There was a lot of luck involved and a lot of good timing, but I can’t say we ever thought: “This is the book that will live forever!”
Read more about Dave and his work on this fansite (except not at the moment because it's under construction. Think of it as something for later)
Here’s his entry on the elegantly titled Comiclopedia:
http://lambiek.net/artists/g/gibbons_d.htm
(Google alert: Dave Gibbons who wrote Watchmen is not to be confused with Dave Gibbons, freelance visual artist, whose CV is fairly impressive even if he isn’t responsible for one of the most influential comic books of the 20thc)
Interview © 2008 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com
