James OBarr creator of The Crow

James OBarr creator of The Crow

By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 21, 2004

I don’t think I have ever been as nervous talking to a comic book writer on the phone than when I booked this interview with James O’Barr. As we all know, O’Barr is the creator of The Crow comic book, which later became a movie starring Brandon Lee.

The Crow comic was a very important book for me. Not only was it one of the first independent comic books I ever read but it felt like it was my skull opened on the page. All the pain, anger and angst I felt as a young teenager was spitting out from the main character’s mouth and gun barrels. I had so much rage when I was a kid and here was a character that had loved his fiancé so much, saw her murdered in front of him and later came back as a tool of vengeance to wreck havoc on his enemies. I imagined myself as The Crow, an invincible being, stopping the cars of those who picked on me and killing them with my bare hands. But luckily I didn’t need to do that. O’Barr had enough pain for the both of us.

By now O’Barr’s reasons for creating The Crow have passed into legend. After a drunk driver killed his girlfriend he joined the Marines where he traveled around Europe creating The Crow comic book. After finally being published by different companies The Crow was made into a movie by Miramax and director Alex Proyas. The film is most infamous because Brandon Lee died after being accidentally shot on the set causing O’Barr even more heartbreak.

It has been ten years since the film was first released and now O’Barr is releasing an author’s edition of The Crow trade paperback and preparing his new comic series.

Check out the James O’Barr official website.

Daniel Robert Epstein: You’ve been pretty busy this past year.
James O'Barr: Yeah I made the move out to LA because that’s where all the jobs and money seem to be. It was just getting more and more difficult to do it from Detroit. I’m kind of commuting. I still have a family in Detroit which I go back to visit every two months or so. Most of the time is spent out here doing storyboards, commissions and things like that. Plus the comic books I’m doing.
DRE:
Are you doing storyboards for movies or commercials?
JO:
Whichever pays the best. Film and comics have always been equal in terms of what appeals to me and what influences me the most. I always looked at comics as cheap little 15-cent movies where one person gets to be the director, actor, set decorator, costume designer and the writer. It’s a one-man film.
DRE:
When you're doing your commercial work do they know who you are?
JO:
Usually it’s because of what they see in my portfolio. It does help to have a name so they automatically know what I am capable of. They know I can bring atmosphere and a certain sense to what they are trying to bring across. It’s not something that they have to beat into me. I already understand what they are after. When they ask for me they are asking for a certain type of thing.
DRE:
You’ve been doing bigger conventions recently.
JO:
I did them on the east coast for years and years. I just never had a chance to get out to the shows here in California. Living in Detroit the expense involved is enormous, especially to bring the wife and kids. It’s great that they get to go to Sea World but I usually had to limit it to two shows a year, San Diego and one other in California. Now that I’m out here it’s easy. My weekends are free so it gives me a chance to get out there and have face time with the fans.
DRE:
What’s the age range of the fans that come to see you?
JO:
Normally it goes from late teens to mid-30’s.
DRE:
That’s great that teenagers still get into your work.
JO:
Yeah. The film kind of gets rediscovered every three to four years via television or DVD and then that brings a whole new set of fans to the book as well. It’s like this perpetual renewing source of fans. The majority of them are the exact opposite of the typical comic’s fan. 50 to 60 percent of my readers are female and that’s the exact opposite of the normal comics fan. I would assume that’s because of the romance elements and that the book is one long love letter to a girl that I basically worshipped. I think all women find that attractive to some degree.
DRE:
Did it ever feel odd to you that a book like The Crow, which is so personal for you, has become an industry upon itself?
JO:
Yeah. I try to keep those two things separated. The book is still something very personal to me. In fact, I reread it again for the first time in years because I’m putting together the author’s edition of the book. I was actually shocked at how far I stuck my neck out sometimes. When I was doing it, publication was the last thing I had in mind. I thought there was an audience out there that might get all the musical references but I just didn’t know if they would be interested in the intimate romance element that I had running throughout. Actually, that’s the best way to approach anything, don’t write for an audience but write for yourself so that way you're not setting up any boundaries. There are no hurdles you have to overcome when you write for yourself other than your own inabilities to get across what you are thinking or feeling.
DRE:
Did the emotions you had when first doing the book feel fresh when you reread it?
JO:
It definitely took me back to a time when I was not in very good shape. I was very self destructive and the book was essentially one last love letter to this person. That was going to be it, the period on the end of the sentence. I had no idea what was going to happen to me after that. All the emotion is still there just creeping beneath the surface. It doesn’t take much to put a scratch on it and let it bleed through. It’s still a very personal work. Being turned into a franchise by Hollywood hasn’t sanitized it. Though the first film is very dear to me because of Brandon [Lee], Alex Proyas and the people I got to meet on the set. Also the movie is as faithful of an adaptation as it could have been being a Hollywood project.
DRE:
I always pick out the pawnshop scene in the movie as being the best-translated scene from a comic book to a movie.
JO:
It is literally almost shot for shot from the comic. Jon Polito [the actor who played the owner of the pawnshop] was who I had in mind when I was drawing it so seeing him in it was phenomenal. He just happened to be at the set next door shooting a Coen Brothers’ film and agreed to stay on another week to do the pawnshop scene. I was ecstatic about that. The only trepidation I had was that Jon Polito is such a powerful character actor and would Brandon be able to hold his own with him. At that point I hadn’t seen anything Brandon had done on film. That was the first week I got onto the set and the first dailies I saw were the pawnshop sequence. Essentially I think Brandon stole the whole sequence from Jon Polito, which is not an easy thing to do, and all my fears were gone right then.
DRE:
Have you ever heard of SuicideGirls before we booked this interview?
JO:
I had seen ads for a burlesque show but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. I’m relatively new to the Internet and that type of thing. I got my first computer about two weeks ago. I finally got tired of having to have others go through all my emails so I decided that I should come out of the cave and do it myself. It wasn’t fear of technology or anything like that. I had friends that were amazing artists and they got this big gray shoebox sitting on their art table and suddenly they couldn’t use pencil and paper anymore. I had fear of that happening to me. I would rely too much on this technological tool and it would take away everything that I find special about creating. I love feel of brushes, paper and canvas underneath my hand. I need that as part of the process.
DRE:
It’s only been two weeks so we’ll see if that happens.
JO:
Well I’m already seeing the amazing things you can do with color transitions, tweaking colors and sucking all the color out of a picture just to change the level of emotion. But I still look at it as a just a tool.
DRE:
Computer coloring is the big thing in comics now.

JP: It certainly is. But fortunately I have been able to work mostly in black and white. All the color things I’ve done have been works I’ve painted myself so I haven’t been at the whims of anyone else’s ideas of what color should be in my work.
DRE:
SuicideGirls is very much known for being a Goth type website. One of the things that you helped create with The Crow comic book and the movie is the look of the Goth subculture. Do you feel that was a good or a bad thing?
JO:
Both, I think. Any time something gets assimilated into the mainstream it tends to lose part of its edge. When your favorite band suddenly has a number one hit you're not allowed to like them anymore. Even though I don’t understand that mentality, I am part of it. I listened to all those punk bands in the late 70’s and as soon as they had a hit song I couldn’t listen to them anymore because it was something I discovered and suddenly it belonged to everyone else. I’m not sure why that is but I feel like that with The Crow. It’s been assimilated into the mainstream, subsequent films have become progressively worse and they’ve lost their edge. The Crow was never meant to be this Star Trek or James Bond type franchise where it has these ten certain elements in every film. It is just really limiting as to how it can be presented. In fact, I wrote a treatment for the second Crow film that involved a woman who was killed at her own wedding in her wedding dress and she comes back a year later and hunts down the 12 villains that killed her. They told me it would never fly, people wouldn’t like the idea of a woman vigilante and ten years later Kill Bill is bringing in $200 million or something.
DRE:
I remember reading about your treatment.
JO:
Yeah it’s just hilarious that the money-people just don’t have a clue as to what will work. They are the ones who make decisions on what will make it to theater. I tried to sell the idea and I even did some beautiful artwork for it. I had this Joan Jett Gothic looking chick in this burned up wedding dress all held together with barbed wire, nails and electrical tape. It looked cool as hell but they asked me if I could put a male Crow figure in there. I said, “That just defeats the whole purpose of having a female lead. It makes her subservient to the male.” They could not see what I was getting at. It takes someone with Tarantino’s vision to bring it to the screen. Hooray for him.
DRE:
What’s going to be in the author’s edition of The Crow?
JO:
All together there is going to be at least 60 pages of new material that no one has ever seen. Half of that are pages that had to be removed for space reasons because the companies I was working with at the beginning were as ignorant about producing comics as I was. They were under the belief that comics had to be an equal number of pages for it to be folded over and stapled. In actuality it has to be in increments of 12 pages because of the press that is used. I would turn in a 38-page book and it couldn’t be more than 32 pages. So I would have to pull out random pages that hopefully didn’t affect the story too much but in some instances it did. All those pages will be back in. I also took some pages out because I kept getting unfairly grouped in with people like Tim Vigil who were doing this excessively violent works. If you look at The Crow most of the violence isn’t overt, it’s more hinted at in the shadows. Maybe you’ll see blood splash on the wall but you don’t see heads explode. So I purposely pulled back on some of the violent scenes even though they weren’t nearly as excessive as what others were doing.
DRE:
Will those pages be in the back of the book or included in the story?
JO:
It’s all going to be in sequence, right back where they belong. There were a lot more romance flashback scenes between Eric and Shelly that I took out because the publisher didn’t like the idea of 28 pages of romance with this couple making love on the kitchen floor then four pages of action. I had to take some of them out, rearrange them or shorten them. To me those were the most powerful sequences because they justified every bit of violence that followed. Then there are like two or three different sequences that I had the idea for but didn’t have the ability to pull off. I would try to draw it and it would physically not work or I just did not have the skills to make it happen. An example is that I have a sequence that is an entire shootout reflected upside down in a pool of blood on the street so you're not actually seeing any of the physical violence. Whenever I would show the pages to someone they would inevitably turn the pages upside down and look at it so to me it wasn’t working. Ten years later now I do have that ability. I don’t think there is a sequence that I can think of that I can’t physically draw. It’s going to be much more visually interesting. The characters will have more depth; even the more subservient characters now have whole pages of dialogue such as the little girl and the police officer.
DRE:
Did you show any of those pages to the people who wrote the first Crow screenplay? Because obviously the cop and the little girl have much bigger parts in the movie.
JO:
Yeah they saw a lot of the stuff that was taken out. I also wrote them a long treatment and I talked daily to John Shirley who wrote the first four drafts of the screenplay about what I had intended for the characters. He worked most of those elements into the film. A lot of the stuff in the film was initially in the book and now people will be able to see them. People who are fans of the film will find even more similarities in the book and people who are fans of the book will see where a lot of the stuff in the film came from.
DRE:
Ten years ago when Brandon passed you said “God has had his elbow on my neck my whole life.”
JO:
It felt like life was an endurance test at that point and for a few years after that. I really had a hard time dealing with Brandon’s death. It was almost like my girlfriend’s death all over again. It was abrupt and totally out of the blue that one couldn’t prepare for. So a lot of those same old feelings resurfaced. I only in retrospect understand it as a form of survivor’s guilt. I wished that I had never written it because if I hadn’t Brandon would still be here and the film world would have this bright shining white light of an incredible actor that we only get hints of in the films he left behind. I think The Crow was the one bright star on the horizon of what his future would have been. It was the film he was the most proud, he finally felt like he wasn’t in his father’s shadow anymore.
DRE:
Today do you feel like that great yolk is a little removed from your neck?
JO:
Absolutely. It took a few years and took quite a few visits to Brandon’s grave to finally go full circle and realize that I needed to let some things go. I have a dump truck full of things that I can worry about and carry around with me for the rest of my life but I need to let some of that stuff go. It can’t change. No matter how hard I try all the effort, angst and pain I pour into it isn’t going to change the outcome. I’ve become more logical about the chains I drag around with me. Plus I have two beautiful little girls now so I’m a relatively happy guy. People are freaked out when they meet me and I’m not Robert Smith, all sullen and shit. I’m essentially a normal guy and they’re totally caught off guard that I’m not all dressed in black with hair all spiked up and eyeliner. I certainly went through that phase when I was younger, but now that I’m an adult its still cool to listen to that music but it doesn’t work in a fashion sense.
DRE:
How old are your girls?
JO:
I have a three year old and a nine year old.
DRE:
So they haven’t read your works.
JO:
Gabrielle, our nine year old is aware of it. She’s quite a good artist in her own right. She’ll sit at the drawing board with me and draw. She understands that these things aren’t real and are just images that are sometimes scary and funny. That was something I always worried about, how much of my work do I expose these kids to. But once you talk to them and they understand it’s not real, it’s cool. She is more interested in knowing how they exploded a head in a movie then being horrified by the exploding head.
DRE:
Are you still in contact with Alex Proyas [the director of The Crow]?
JO:
No, Alex divorced himself from anything having to do with The Crow after the film was finished. It’s unfortunate because I credit him and Brandon with bringing everything that was important in the book to the screen under the Hollywood yolk. I would like to sit down, have coffee with him and talk about things. But I think it’s still a real painful area for him to go into. Unfortunately I think he will forever be branded as the director who killed his star. It was a series of fuck-ups that really had nothing to do with him other than that as the director he was in charge of the set but it was virtually nothing that he did that caused the accident.
DRE:
What music did you listen to as you were growing up?
JO:
The Stooges, MC5 some Elvis and I went through a Beatles phase, which dumped right into the Sex Pistols, punk and New Wave scene. I’ve never really left that. I’ve always stayed with the alternative music. I detest bands like Journey or any of those concert hall bands. Although at one point I was a big Queen fan up until A Night at the Opera. I was really amazed at Brian May’s guitar playing. But I was into anything well done and that had truth in it. I’ll listen to anything whether it’s gothic, folk music or the latest hardcore band.
DRE:
Are you into newer music?
JO:
Oh definitely. I’m not stuck in one era. I listen to the radio, real alternative radio, not what passes for alternative radio now.
DRE:
Bought any good CDs lately?
JO:
There are a lot of songs I like but I haven’t focused in on any particular bands. There is this one gothic folk singer I like named Mark Eitzel. He used to be in this band called American Music Club. Its kind of like if Joy Division was from Nebraska.
DRE:
I saw on your website you're going to be at this thing called Bloody Beach.
JO:
Yeah it’s a show in Jamaica that’s going to have some comic book artists, actors and B-movie starlets. The guy who started it put on Star Trek shows where you could go on this cruise with William Shatner and whoever to hang out. This time he’s going to try it with comic book people and horror genre people. So hopefully it will work out and if not then it’s a free trip to Jamaica.
DRE:
I saw a film called Wicked Prayer on your IMDB entry. What’s that?
JO:
That’s the newest Crow film with Edward Furlong, Dennis Hopper and David Boreanaz. I haven’t seen it so I can’t give any opinion on it. The initial idea didn’t sound too interesting to me. It’s gangster Indians at a reservation casino. Haven’t they fucked with the Indians enough? Like I was saying, the sequels have gotten worse so it’s not a good sign.
DRE:
Do the movies keep you solvent?
JO:
Well I own the character so in theory they are supposed to pay me every time they use it but as with all things in Hollywood it seems to have to go through lawyer’s hands before anything actually happens. All the money I made off the first film was given to charity and things of that nature. Once Brandon was killed I didn’t want any of the money because it felt like blood money. I didn’t have a family at the time so I didn’t have to think about those kinds of things. I bought my mother a new car, helped out my brother and the rest was given to children’s charities. I was making enough money off the books that I didn’t have to worry about things like that. Now that I have a family to support so the residuals from these films are important. I’m not really a perfectionist but a job has to be right for me before I will release it to the public so I tend to take longer on projects than other people would.
DRE:
I heard about your vampire western comic.
JO:
Yeah, it’s called Sundown in Hell. I thought I would take two of my favorite genres and throw in two of my favorite actors to see what would happen. It started out as this fun kind of goofy gothic western thing. If Robert Mitchum and Joan Jett were vampires in the old west during the Civil War halfway through an Indian uprising. I thought it would be a great chance to do all these atmospheric western shots and a whole bunch of violence [laughs]. I didn’t realize how much research I was going to have to put into Civil War uniforms and weapons. People that are fans of that type of stuff are such nitpickers that if the insignia is wrong on some guy’s shoulder patch then I’m going to catch hell for it. So I have dozens of notebooks filled with reference material. It’s still a lot of fun and hasn’t lost the core meaning for me.
DRE:
What company is going to put it out?
JO:
Right now Vertigo has showed the most interest but I haven’t picked a publisher yet. Once I get the third issue done I will start shopping it around.
DRE:
Vertigo would be wonderful.
JO:
Yeah they seem to be most open and most mature in the books they are putting out. Marvel seems to think titties and the word fuck makes something mature. That makes it R-rated, what makes it mature is the themes. If I don’t self publish it then Vertigo will be the way to go.
DRE:
What comics do you read now?
JO:
I read a lot of the Vertigo books, Catwoman and Gotham Central. I don’t follow anything obsessively. I will just pick up something for the artwork or for someone who is working on it. Lots of independent books, nothing specific though.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck
23 Comments PRINT
Email this Interview

YOUR NAME:

YOUR EMAIL:

THEIR NAME:

THEIR EMAIL: