Cameron Stewart is a familiar name to comics fans. He has been working in the industry for years, but it was 2004's Seaguy, a Vertigo miniseries from writer Grant Morrison, that put him on the map. Since then there have been several more of high profile projects including a sequel to Seaguy entitled Seven Soldiers: Guardian, a story arc on Batman and Robin (also written by Grant Morrison), and the Vietnam War miniseries, The Other Side (with
Weapon X writer Jason Aaron).
More recently Stewart's projects have included a webcomic called
Sin Titulo, which won him the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic last year. He also co-wrote and co-illustrated Assassin's Creed: The Fall, a story set in Czarist Russia that ties into the video game.
His next big project is for SG. He's designing the characters, drawing the covers and inking the
SuicideGirls miniseries that's coming out via IDW starting this month.
Stewart took time out from his hectic schedule to chat with us.
ALEX DUEBEN: So how did you end up involved with the SuicideGirls comic?
CAMERON STEWART: Well, I had been interested in doing something with SuicideGirls for a while. I knew a couple of the girls, who were just personal friends of mine, and was encouraged to contact Missy and see if I could do some merchandise - prints or a deck of cards or a calendar or something. I contacted her and she said, "oh my god, this is perfect timing because we’re in the planning stages of doing a comic book." This was right before the San Diego Comic Con, so I went to San Diego and met with IDW, who are the publishers. Initially I was only able to commit to doing covers and character designs because I was busy with a lot of other projects, but over time, I’ve been slowly convinced into doing more. I was asked to do these two-page backup features in each issue. Then most recently I was given the opportunity to ink the whole book as well so I took that. It’s been fun. I’m committing to more and more because I’m enjoying working on it.
AD: You haven’t done many jobs where you’re inking over other people.
CS: I actually started my career as an inker. The first few years of my career I was inking. I did a book for Vertigo called
Deadenders, I inked
Swamp Thing and
Hellblazer. I was inking
Catwoman]/I] for a while and then I graduated into being the sole artist on the book. Since then I’ve been doing my own art and not inking other people. I did a graphic novel called The Apocalipstix for Oni Press, where I wasn’t really paid all that much up front, and In order to finance that I did some inking on a book for Vertigo called
Vinyl Underground. Generally speaking, I like to pencil and ink my own work, but inking’s fun. It’s a different approach because I’m embellishing what another artist has done and bringing my own thing into it rather than coming up with it all on my own, so it can lead to some interesting collaboration.
AD: What kind of instructions were you given as to the tone and mood of the story in doing the designs?
CS: I was given a document, which I believe was written by Missy, that had brief descriptions of all the characters. I wanted them to be very convincing, to be believable as real SuicideGirl models and so I spent a lot of time just breaking down the different archetypes that exist among the girls on the site. They are definitely different “types.” I wanted to kind of reflect each of those archetypes accurately and make them convincing. I picked out a bunch of girls who I thought best exemplified those types, and I just stole from them basically, I took various elements that I thought fit together. Hopefully the final result is that these girls, even though fictional, feel like they could fit in very well with the regular group of girls.
AD: Before this have you ever designed characters to hand off to someone else to draw?
CS: No, this is the first thing I’ve done where I've done design work for another artist. I had an interest in doing that, rather than only doing the covers. I could have just signed on to do covers and drawn from another artist's designs, but I was interested in doing the character designs. I thought it was an interesting challenge and volunteered to do it.
AD: Tell me about the backup stories in each issue.
CS: The concept was that they’re these historical segments that depict SuicideGirls throughout history. Each one would be a different time period featuring strong women. The first one is set during the Salem witch trials. I believe there’s going to be one with the suffragettes getting the right to vote. They're written by Steve Niles, who’s a great writer and someone I wanted to work with. It’s two pages in each issue so it seemed like a small enough commitment of time and I thought they would be fun to do.
AD: Is it a real challenge in telling a story in that short a space?
CS: I think the challenge is less in the drawing and more in the writing of it. Two pages is very, very short. Trying to try to come up with a satisfying chunk of story that has character, motivation, drama, conflict and resolution, that’s very tough. The hardest part of drawing it is then trying to cram all that visual information into only two pages and have the readers understand where it is and making sure there’s not too much action that crowds the page. Steve wrote a good little vignette that works really well in two pages.
AD: Do you enjoy historical stories?
CS: Yeah. I just finished doing the
Assassin’s Creed miniseries, which is largely set in Nineteenth and early Twentieth century Russia. It’s fun but it’s certainly more of a challenge than doing modern day stuff where you’re just drawing generic buildings. It’s a challenge to make sure it’s all historically accurate because I’m a stickler for that kind of thing. I feel that if you’re going to do something that’s a period setting, it really counts for a lot to get the details right, because otherwise it just feels fake.
AD: Assassin’s Creed, which just finished is a miniseries based on the video game that you co-wrote and co-illustrated with Karl Kerschl. Would you like to write and draw more in future?
CS: Oh absolutely. I really like collaborating with writers, and I’m really fortunate to have worked with a lot of fantastic writers in my career - Steve Niles, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Ray Fawkes, Ed Brubaker and Jason Aaron. I definitely enjoy it. But there's something very different about writing your own material. I started [writing comics] with my webcomic
Sin Titulo and was really enjoying it, and found out that I felt comfortable doing it. I don’t think I’ll ever shut out the possibility of collaborating with people, but I definitely would love to write and draw more. Fortunately I’ve been offered some other projects. Since
Sin Titulo won the Eisner Award it’s opened a lot of doors for me as a writer.
AD: I wanted to talk about
Assassin’s Creed just because the book seems to have flown under the radar. How did this come together?
CS: Ubisoft came to us. They wanted to open up the
Assassin’s Creed universe and explore other media, and one of the things that they wanted to do was comics based on the games. They’d done a graphic novel in France a couple years ago, but they wanted something for the English-language market. Fortunately for Karl and I, our studio is only a couple blocks away from Ubisoft. They heard that we were nearby, came over and looked at our work and thought that we were the right people to do the comic for them, particularly because we were already big fans of the video games. Karl and I are both gamers and were fans of
Assassin’s Creed long before we’d ever been approached to do the comic.
AD: The comic set in Russia which is a change from the games. What was it like working with Ubisoft and were they looking for in the comic?
CS: They wanted to open up the universe. Initially they had asked for another story featuring Ezio, the character from the second and third games. We considered that and did a short three page test comic featuring Ezio. It was fun, but we quickly realized it was more creatively interesting for us to do an entirely new setting with a new character and not repeat the character from the game. One of things that I think is the pitfall of a lot of video game comics is they’re just the "further adventures of Lara Croft" or whatever, they tend to feel inconsequential. To a lot of gamers they feel like side stories that don’t have any bearing on the main storyline of the games. We had an opportunity, by creating a new storyline with a new character, and solidly tie it into the game storyline, to create something that would enrich the mythology of [the game]. To develop something that didn’t just feel like a cheap spin-off and actually be something that was almost a necessary expansion of the storyline. We wanted to make something that felt important to the games, and also was satisfying as a stand alone story. We wanted to make it a comic that could be read and enjoyed by someone who’s never played
Assassin’s Creed. Obviously it’s going to be deeper and more meaningful if you’re aware of the game already and you know the backstory, but we wanted to tell a story that could be read and enjoyed by someone who’d never played the gams before, and then possibly inspire them to pick up the game.
That was our initial approach. We were given a list of possible time periods, but it wasn’t in any way a finite list. We could come up with anything we wanted. That was the great thing about working with [Ubisoft]. They gave us carte blanche, basically, and said "do whatever you want," and were really open to our ideas. They didn’t restrict us at all. When we were looking through this list of possible time periods, the one that really leapt out at us was Tsarist Russia, leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. I can’t even really say why it intrigued us so much, but it just sparked something in both of us. It was appropriate because the games are set typically during these periods of great social and political upheaval. The first game is set during the Crusades. The second game is during the Renaissance. The Russian Revolution is a similarly important time of social change, so that was something we just felt intrigued to explore. Then when we started reading about it we started finding all of these events such as the Borki train disaster, which figures into the first issue, and other real events that just seemed to form a storyline for us without us even having to try. That was one of the things Patrice [Desilets, director of the
Assassin's Creed games] was telling us. He said, “just look to history and the answers are all there.” And he’s right. It was really fun to just read through actual documented history and piece this stuff together. Of course it’s our job to sew it together and write stuff that happens behind and around the established events, but it worked out really well. It was a nice setting. The interesting thing is a lot of games or comics or whatever that are set in Russia usually deal with Soviet Russia, and not a lot to do with anything that’s pre-revolution, so it was fun to do something that was at once familiar but also unexplored.
AD: What kind of research did you do for the book? Did you go to Russia?
CS: We did. One of the great benefits of working for a video game company is that they will send you on research trips. (laughs) We got to go to St. Petersburg for four and a half days. We went all over the city and looked at all the places that were of relevance to our story. We took tons of photographs and video and did sketching and drawing. The great benefit of taking a trip like that is just being in that place and getting a feel for it. I did the same thing when I drew
The Other Side for Vertigo, which is my Vietnam War comic. I went over to Vietnam for three weeks. Just being there in the actual place where this happened gives you a connection to it that no amount of photographs or movies will give you, and it's invaluable. I think it really does make the final product seem a lot more authentic.
AD: Having done that for different projects, when you draw something like
Seaguy that you did with Grant Morrison, where it’s fantastic and not based on a place, does this require an extra step for you when you’re planning and designing the book knowing that you need to fill that in yourself?
CS: Absolutely.
Seaguy is a different challenge because you’re creating something from the ground up. That was its own set of challenges. A lot of it is just drawn from my own imagination. A lot of it is just trying to come up with familiar elements that exist in our world and bringing them into the fantasy world to ground it and make it feel somewhat real. Grant will mention in the script real world things. Like the town of New Venice where Seaguy lives - there’s a little manufactured community, called Seaport Village I think, that exists next to the San Diego Convention Center, which obviously we see every year when we go to Comic Con. It’s this weird little fake tourist seaside village and that was the feel that he wanted for New Venice. He said that he wanted it to feel like it was this kind of gaudy tourist attraction and so the last time I went to San Diego before drawing the comic, I took a bunch of photographs of Seaport Village. It’s drawing familiar elements from the real world and re-casting them in a fantasy setting.
AD: Since we’re talking about
Seaguy, have you and Grant talked about a third volume?
CS: We’ve talked about it. It was always intended to be a trilogy. When the first series came out, a lot of people were baffled by the ending because they thought it didn’t make any sense. We were always trying to stress that’s only because they’ve read the first of three parts. Unfortunately the series did not sell tremendously well, and so it took quite a while to get the second volume greenlit. Really it’s a passion project for Grant. It doesn’t do that well sales-wise.
It’s just something that he wants to do, and I really like it. I think it’s something that’s really unique and not like anything else that’s out there. At the moment the third part really comes down to availability for the both of us. Since the first series, I’ve started doing a lot more and Grant’s started doing a lot more. He’s doing eighteen different things, Batman things and music videos and screenplays. It’s one of those projects where when the time is right and both of us have it in our schedules to do it, I’m sure it will get done. Unfortunately, I have no concrete answer as to when that will be.
AD: Like you said, it’s not the biggest seller and I’m sure that DC, given the option, would rather have you two collaborate on
Batman for three issues than do three issues of
Seaguy.
CS: Absolutely. But it would be a shame to leave it unfinished having done that much of it. It’s one of those things that we hope, maybe it doesn’t sell very well now, but once it’s complete maybe people will go back to it. They can sell it as the complete story, and they can say “from the team that did
Batman and Robin.” There’s always a future life for things. And you never know, it could be one of these things that isn’t a hit right away, but maybe twenty years from now, someone will really like it and make a movie out of it.
AD: You and Grant are also working on another project together.
Thunderworld.
CS: (laughs) I love Grant. I do. But sometimes he speaks out of turn. (laughs) I had people coming up to me at San Diego congratulating me and saying they were really looking forward to
Thunderworld and I had never even heard of it before. (laughs) I'm slightly fibbing - he *had* mentioned to me like three years ago, or even longer. He asked, "would you be interested in doing a Captain Marvel story?" His description of it was an
All-Star Superman-like approach to Captain Marvel, which sounded great.
All-Star Superman is one of my favorite comics and I thought if anyone could do that for Captain Marvel, he could. So I said, "yes, that sounds great." Then I never heard anything again, until this past San Diego when he announces this project. It’s something that when it’s written, and when I have time, I’m certainly down for, but it’s not anything that exists beyond a title at the moment.
AD: Your webcomic
Sin Titulo. It won the Eisner Award last year for best digital comic. It’s also been on hiatus since last year.
CS: Yeah, unfortunately. I don’t earn any money from it. There have been a small handful of readers who have very generously donated, but I look at it basically as making tips if I were playing guitar on the sidewalk. I don’t really earn any money to do it. It was something that I was doing purely for myself, in the interest of doing my own work and developing my skills as a writer. Unfortunately when you have the decision to make between doing something for free, or being able to pay your rent… (laughs) At first I was able to balance it and do the contract work through the week and on the weekend do
Sin Titullo, but it just became overwhelming. I was working seven days a week and having a bit of a breakdown. This is my passion project. The last thing that I wanted was for it to become something I *have* to do, instead of *wanting* to do. If I’m forcing myself to do it, and not enjoying it, then it’s no good. I decided that I would take a break from it for a while and focus on getting the contract work finished and once that was all done then I would return to it.
After the Eisner Award a lot of publishers were interested. I’m not going to say who it is just yet, but there’s a publisher who I’m very interested in working with and they’re going to publish the book. My goal would be to update it far more frequently. I used to update it once a week, if that, and what I would like to be able to do is update it Monday through Friday until it’s finished . If it was daily it would only last for a couple more months. I estimate the story will finish around 175 or 200 pages. Not that much longer. It will be complete online and then it will be released in 2012, I believe, as a hardcover book.
AD: Is there anything else going on that you can talk about?
CS: That’s probably it. There’s the possibility of doing more
Assassin’s Creed. I know that Ubisoft was very happy with what we did and there is potential for further storylines in the comics that we’ve discussed.
AD: Would the idea be to do more in different period or more with Nikolai?
CS: There are long term plans to do other timelines, but the current plan would be to expand on Nikolai Orelov. Their thinking, and they’re absolutely right, is that if they’re going to introduce a new character they want to focus on that new character and develop him thoroughly, rather than just introduce a dozen new characters and not spend any time on any of them. They want to make it a, quote, "real" character in this universe. So if it turns out that we do another series it will probably be another story about Orelov.
That’s really all I can say. There’s the potential of more Batman stuff with Grant. There’s a couple other things that are probably premature to talk about but pretty exciting and some stuff that if it all goes through I’ll be writing and drawing for a big publisher so that’s cool.
AD: What is it that you like about working with Grant Morrison?
CS: He’s one of my favorite writers. He’s probably always been my favorite comics writer. The story that I often tell is that when I was thirteen I lined up to get his autograph and now I’m working with him. (laughs) Now I have creator owned comics with him. I think he’s boundlessly creative, he constantly tries to push the envelope. When he’s doing mainstream comics with superhero characters, he has a real innate understanding of what makes these characters work and what makes them appealing, and then he takes that understanding and is able to do things with that seem so obvious, but no one’s ever done before. I’m always amazed at that ability. And when he’s doing his creator owned stuff, he does things quite unlike anyone else is doing in comics.
His scripts can be a total nightmare sometimes. I’ve read his scripts where I sit back and say, “sure, it’s easy for you to write this, but I’ve got to draw it.” (laughs) “You can write a sentence about the four dimensional structure of space-time, but I’m the guy who’s got to draw it.” At times it can be very daunting, but it’s more interesting to figure out how to crack that problem than it would be to just sit and draw safe easy stuff all the time. What it comes down to is that he makes the kind of comics I like to read.
AD: In closing, to get back to the SuicideGirls comic, what can people look forward to in the book?
CS: I think that it’s going to really appeal to the SG community, because we've really tried to capture the spirit of SuicideGirls. It’s a book about a bunch of attractive young women kicking ass and taking names. It’s an
A-Team/
Charlie’s Angels kind of thing with a bunch of girls with tattoos. It’s really fun to draw!
very typical of him. I'm starting to just feel like I just don't need him anyway...my mom's way more legit.
stokedd
