Darick Robertson
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Darick Robertson was previously best known for co-creating Transmetropolitan with Warren Ellis. He is also one of the comic industry’s most realistic artists, sometimes disturbingly so. Not that his artwork is photorealistic like Alex Ross or overly detailed like Neal Adams but his characters just look real. Apparently Robertson was taken to task for that when he based the lead character in The Boys, Wee Hughie, on SuicideGirls’ favorite Simon Pegg. But Pegg is a big fan of the book, Robertson and the co-creator of The Boys, Garth Ennis. Ennis says that The Boys is the book that will, “out-Preacher Preacher.” In just a short six issues they are moving towards that goal. The Boys is the story of a group of people whose mission in life is to take down the world’s superheroes. Specifically The Seven, a team of the most well loved superheroes in the world but they are actually sexually depraved maniacs and one of them is responsible for the death of Wee Hughie's girlfriend. Currently the seventh issue of The Boys is on the stands alongside the trade paperback collecting the first six issues.

But the trade paperback of The Boys

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Darick Robertson: I am up to my eyeballs. I’m in the process of doing a variety of things today. I am finishing the inking on a Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Freddy Krueger comic book cover. I’m trying to ink five pages of The Authority and I’m going to pencil some of that by tomorrow. That’s going to take up my whole day.

DRE: So no Boys this week?

DR: No, I’m going to start that tomorrow.

DRE: What issue are you up to?

DR: I am on issue number nine. I’m going to start the inking on issue ten. We’re trying to get as far out ahead as possible. Everyone is hoping I’m not going to crack under the pressure.

DRE: I read that The Boys might be a little different than if it stayed at Wildstorm.

DR: Well, that’s debatable. Here’s what’s going on as far as that goes, the reality is that Wildstorm was trying to be as considerate and careful as possible to not step on DC’s toes while we were with them. All I’m saying is that we tried very carefully to walk a line that we crossed at some point. It was sort of arbitrary and now that line is no longer there because we’re not dealing with two companies, we’re just dealing with Dynamite. But the best answer to that is that there’s no line to cross at Dynamite.

DRE: Did people think that you and Garth wouldn’t cross the line?

DR: I think there was a chance that they knew what they were getting into at Wildstorm. But with the kind of story that Garth wants to tell, it just gets too close to the bone for them, as far as who we’re parodying. For me, the book is an allegory on power and it’s not supposed to be read literally. It’s not like we wanted to use Batman but couldn’t so we made up a Batman-like character. That’s really not what we’re going for and if the average reader just takes it on face value then they are really missing the underlying story. Since it’s early on and there’s been a lot of controversy, that’s certainly understandable but you need to dig a little deeper with this series and eventually that will be clearer.

DRE: It sounds similar to what people were saying when Rick Veitch released Bratpack.

DR: Bratpack is a very good comparison. Chippy was so much like Robin so there was no doubt what he was doing.

DRE: But it wasn’t really about superheroes fucking their sidekicks.

DR: Right, it was about something bigger. For us The Boys is more of an allegory on power out of control. Admittedly, we’re having some laughs along the way but for me it’s really not about taking down anybody else’s character. I was talking to Garth recently and he said, “There’s an element where you could spend your whole career just playing with other people’s toys,” so to speak and we’re trying to create something new.

DRE: When you were doing Transmetropolitan you and Warren [Ellis] were more about taking the piss out the whole planet and Garth was taking the piss out religion with Preacher. For this book are you guys are just going after people who’ve used power, sort of like Garth was doing with God in Preacher?

DR: Exactly. Garth wasn’t necessarily going after Christians or the Catholic religion, per se. But again it’s fiction and it’s superheroes. It’s strange because I think people are actually more sensitive about that. In DC’s case, it’s understandable because the first issue of The Boys had page after page of what we do and then there’d be ad for Batman so I really don’t blame DC for becoming uncomfortable. We were surprised because we were working way ahead so everybody should have been on the same page but they weren’t. Now everything was handled so well and we’re so pleased with our relationship with DC Comics, me especially, I’m still under contract with them and working on other projects for them and wanting to work on mainstream stuff for them that I don’t want to be viewed as having some beef or score to settle with DC Comics. I don’t and I never did. When the series got greenlit, all the character designs were out there. At the time of the cancellation, I had drawn up to issue ten or 11 so it wasn’t like we were being shy or trying to hide what we were doing. I think it just turned out that they had a change of heart. When you’re dealing with something as big as DC Comics has become, you’re bound to have more than one opinion. Dynamite is a smaller company so we’re going to have more room to maneuver. [Dynamite publisher] Nick Barrucci loved the book so he begged for it. There’s not a big chance that we’re going to do something that’s going to cross Dynamite’s line.

DRE: Does The Boys have the first homosexual blumpkin ever included in a comic book?

DR: Did we do that?

DRE: Yes during one of the Teenage Kix orgies.

DR: I don’t think he was defecating or at least that wasn’t mentioned in the script. That was just where they were doing their drugs and getting it on.

DRE: Oh so it’s not a blumpkin, too bad.

DR: [laughs] Sorry to disappoint.

DRE: Were you ever worried that when The Boys moved to Dynamite that you wouldn’t be able to draw the book anymore?

DR: No, I was more worried that DC wasn’t going to want to be associated with me anymore. I was more concerned that I’d burned the bridge with them because I’m under exclusive with them and I get my health insurance through them. Garth and I really didn’t do anything that we weren’t contracted to do. We honored our contract and then some. We were asked to create this book on time and have it be a seller so we delivered on that. It just came down to DC thinking it would be better off at another publisher. To DC’s credit, everybody was wonderful. I can’t stress that enough. They could have made it a real nightmare. If somebody had a personal beef with us or wanted to see the book die a slow death, that could have happened but nobody took those steps.

But now we’re back on the stands, the sales are better and everything that could have went right, certainly did.

DRE: At one point when the Homelander’s standing in front of Starlight and he says “Suck It,” it sort of looks like he might not have a butthole.

DR: He does but he’d have to be bending over for a view of that.

DRE: [laughs] I saw on your forums that you got to meet up with Simon Pegg.

DR: Yes, Simon’s been a big supporter and is enthusiastic about the book. We’re very grateful for that.

DRE: Did you just figure that he wouldn’t mind having his face in the book because things like that usually have to get cleared?

DR: I guess maybe being the artist I’m not seeing my own work the way other people do. It is not the first time I’ve ever homaged somebody in a comic and I’m not the only one who does it.

DRE: No, not even close.

DR: I’m surprised that that was such a controversy. Everybody got up in arms about it. Simon even wrote us and said, “Hey, that’s awesome, I love Garth’s work.” After the first issue came out he wrote me an email signed ME Hughie. It said, “Hey, I really love what you did, it’s cool to be in the comics.” We were like, “Wow, great.” Just a Simon endorsement would have been nice but he got in touch with us. I told that to Wildstorm and the next thing I knew, they wanted a waiver signed. I’m like, “But if you look in the back the trade paperback for Identity Crisis, there’s a list of all the people Rag Morales wanted his characters to look like.”

DRE: Alex Ross did it a lot as well.

DR: I would say that Alex Ross was the one that inspired me to start doing it more. So I’m not the only guilty party, maybe it is because I chose the right guy. I created the characters and designed them years before they actually saw print or even got out in the public. At that time, I’d just moved back from New York City to California and a friend of mine turned me onto Simon’s TV show Spaced. It was about a guy who worked in a comic books store and Simon’s character in that made me think of Hughie. I have a lot of early sketches of Hughie and you could see I’m almost there. But he was looking too old and rough. But then there’s Simon and he just had the right face model.

DRE: I know that sometimes guys like you have sketchbooks filled up with characters. Did you pull the superhero characters in The Boys from them?

DR: I just make them up as I go along. The ones I worked on really hard were The Seven. There was a lot of back and forth between Garth and I. But as far as the Teenage Kix go, I just drew them right onto the page because I knew they were going to get their heads handed to them.

DRE: Do you and Garth get to see other very often?

DR: I just spent the weekend with him in New York because I was there for a couple of signings. Garth and I socialize as often as we can but being we are on opposite coasts it’s tough. I didn’t stay in a hotel and have the occasional drink and dinner with him and then go back to my hotel. I stayed at his place when I went there. We hung out and talked about life and politics and watched movies. If we were still in New York, I imagine I would see him all the time.

DRE: What movies did you guys watch?

DR: Garth’s got a great DVD collection and one of the best parts about staying with him is him going, “Have you seen this? You have to see this.” So he always turns me on to great stuff that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. In this case, we watched Dead Man Shoes. It’s a recent film by an up and coming breakout director out of England named Shane Meadows. It’s a powerful and hard to watch but is a satisfying movie with this incredible morality. I remember Garth saying “This is what The Punisher movie should be” and he’s absolutely right. We also watched the David Mamet movie Spartan. I hadn’t seen that before and I thought that was great and I found myself thinking that Val Kilmer would be a pretty good Butcher. He’s got that great smirk and he’s got the right face shape and the big jaw. Then we watched Below which is a ghost story on a submarine and one of the writers of that is Darren Aronofsky. I quite liked that too.

DRE: I read a quote from Garth where he said that there are actually some lines that he won’t cross.

DR: It’s funny because some of the stuff that caused the problems was stuff that I did because that’s the way I read it. Garth wanted me to be a little more subtle than I was. I thought that some of those scenes would be better delivered if I were less subtle because they were supposed to be about Hughie. Hughie’s our conduit to this universe and it you don’t follow Hughie’s feelings through it, I don’t think you’re giving the full range of it. I don’t want the violence and the sex and stuff that is shocking to just be for titillation or for humor unless it’s absolutely necessary. Hughie disgust and surprise should be what the readers feel. That’s what I was going for so I would amp some stuff up and Garth was like, “We don’t need to do that.” We’re trying to find our happy medium, keeping it in mind our book’s only eight issues old at this stage.

DRE: If one of your favorite writers like Warren or Garth, said that he wants you to draw this book about a pedophile that’s happy to be a pedophile, would you do it if it was a good script?

DR: It depends on what the story is. I think comics are a very safe place to explore ideas. At the end of the day comics are words and drawings and I’m surprised that people would react certain ways. They think there’s an underlying message that somehow these books are being designed for children to absorb but the reality is that children don’t read them nearly as much as adults. If it’s a good story and at the end of the day, there’s a reason for him to be a pedophile and it doesn’t endorse pedophilia, maybe. I'm the father of two little boys so I’m sure not going to be doing anything that’s going encourage pedophilia. But I don't want pedophilia to be the line I can't cross. I certainly read every script I take. The writers I’ve worked with in general are great. I don’t really have a bad one on the list so I would trust that if somebody like Warren or Garth or Greg Rucka or any of these people came to me and said, “Hey, I got this great idea. You’re perfect for it.” I would read it with an open mind because it’s these people. If some Joe Blow off the street came at me and said, “Hey you like crazy crap, you want to do this? I got a priest who likes kill little boys after he blows them.” I don’t know that I would just go, “Yeah, okay.” I don’t think that’s the way I’ve driven my career. I think if that were the case, I wouldn’t be under exclusive with DC Comics.

DRE: What’s a Garth script like?

DR: He knows what he wants and if there’s a case where something needs to specifically be what he’s looking for he will work to describe an emotion or expression. He’s very concerned about pacing and the dialogue being exact and to the point. But at the same time, he gives a lot of creative freedom in that he doesn’t have to hold my hand the whole time. The same with Warren Ellis, the more I worked with Warren, the less he put on the page. He would write that Spider [Jerusalem] walks down the street in the porn district. I would get to go to town on that page and it would be fun because I would just make up the whole world. I’d make up the signage, I would make up the doorways, I would think of what kind of people would be on that street. The more input I get or the more freedom I have to go crazy with what’s on the page, the better the end results.

DRE: Was the hamster wrapped in duct tape written that way?

DR: That’s exactly what Garth asked for and he wanted it on the cover. He had a very clear idea for that joke.

DRE: Was it your choice not to have him covered in blood or anything like that?

DR: I think we tried to keep it…

DRE: Tasteful? [laughs]

DR: [laughs] If there is a tasteful way to have a hamster crawling out somebody’s rear, yes. It’s a balancing act, for sure. I don’t think that we’ll go specifically for shock and awe. We’re telling a story about depraved people and it’s hard to show a story about depraved people without including depravity. If somebody is awful you have to show why and if you pull back on that, you do your reader a disservice because ultimately people will go, “Eh, that’s not so bad, we live in a crazy world.” What makes me a little bonkers is that you name whatever it is that we’re doing in the comic, I guarantee I’ll find a real life situation that’s ten times worse.

DRE: Oh absolutely.

DR: People get up in arms about something that’s happening in a completely fictional world that you have to go out of your way to access. It’s not like it’s NBC primetime. This is in a comic so you got to go to a store or order it. You have to go out of your way to find this thing, pick it up and read it so it is easy to avoid it if you don’t like it.

DRE: You said depraved when you described The Boys. Can depraved people be good people?

DR: That’s a matter of judgment, it depends on what you consider depravity.

DRE: Let’s say these characters in The Boys.

DR: I don’t think the Boys themselves are depraved in the slightest. I’m talking about the people they beat up. I’m talking about the face of evil in our book. In our comic the face of evil is disguised as the face of good and that’s what I’m saying. Our characters are superheroes so nothing can touch them. They’re like celebrities and politicians. They got their hands deep in the government yet they have this illusion of autonomy and that they’re protecting everybody for the greater good. Then at the same time, they’re greedy and selfish and egotistical and they go to movie premieres and hang out with celebrities and they take product endorsements. They’re the kind of people that the Justice League just aren’t and that is essential that people see that. That scene in number three with the Homelander and Starlight, Superman would never have done that. In fact, I had this conversation with Mark Waid where we said that if Superman walked in on that, that scene would have been very different and I don’t think the Homelander would have fared too well. Superman would never do that but the Homelander would and that’s what makes him the target in The Boys. That’s why it’s good there’s somebody like Butcher to take him down.

DRE: Do you watch The Shield?

DR: Yeah, I love The Shield.

DRE: I always ask people involved with The Shield whether they would want cops out there like Vic Mackey. Forest Whittaker said that he wouldn’t because he grew up in a neighborhood where the cops were pretty bad.

DR: That’s a good example on how far do you go before you become what you despise.

DRE: William Friedkin said the funniest thing to me when I asked him that question. He said “If you’re in trouble who’re you going to call, a hippie?” I thought that was one of the funniest things I ever heard in my life.

DR: That is a good line.

DRE: So I don’t think Butcher and The Boys are good people either.

DR: I disagree with you. I don’t think that they’re bad people. Keep in mind, you never read their backstory. Did Hughie seem to enjoy killing Blarney Cock?

DRE: Not at all.

DR: He was shocked and appalled and didn’t want to be there. If you’re fighting evil you can’t not cross that line to some degree. Again, are you going to call a hippie? [laughs] That’s a perfect example. Violence begets violence unfortunately and I’m not a violent person but I like the reality of violence to be representative. I don’t like to pretend that violence doesn’t occur. I hated it when I was a kid watching GI Joe cartoons where you’d see a plane blow up and a little parachute come out.

DRE: I hated that too.

DR: Bullshit. It doesn’t happen that way. War is bad, war is awful and people die horrifically. My buddy was in the first Desert Storm and the letters I would get from him really opened my eyes to what he had to go through. Long tedium interrupted by sheer terror. I don’t think that that’s fair to represent it as glorious or wonderful. I don’t think that’s a good message. I think it should be awful. It should make you nauseous and if it only just existed in comics, I think that would be a great world.

DRE: With The Boys, do you feel like you’re making a statement that’s getting to the right people?

DR: I’m speaking like I’m very opinionated but I didn’t really start The Boys to be my political platform, by any means. I’m just surprised by the controversy. For me, it was an opportunity to work with my friend, Garth, who I respect greatly and have been a fan of long before we got to be friends. I love his work, I loved Preacher, we met when Preacher was in its heyday and Transmet was getting going. So the opportunity to create a book with Garth Ennis was a no brainer. It would be like turning [Martin] Scorcese down if he asked you to be in one of his movies. That’s what it’s like creating something new with Garth. Everything we’ve done together has been controversial and successful.

DRE: Obviously, you’re real busy and Warren Ellis is really busy but would you guys ever consider doing anything with Transmet again?

DR: No, I don’t that’s going to happen. I think Transmet has run its course. We were both happy with where and how it ended. There was some talk at one point about doing prequels to it but there’s never been any follow up on that and the further away we get from that I think the more we want to leave well enough alone.

DRE: I interviewed Patrick Stewart for the last X-Men movie and he said that he doesn’t think a live-action movie or cartoon is going to happen with Transmetropolitan.

DR: I don’t think it’s going to happen. I think too much time has passed. Patrick Stewart is a fantastic actor and I have a great deal of respect for him but let’s be honest, he’s not getting any younger. It would be different if it was in production or something. I would still be ecstatic if that was going to happen but realistically I think he’s got better fish to fry.

DRE: What about without Patrick Stewart?

DR: No one is talking about anything with Transmet at the moment. I have a feeling that eventually someone’s going to get around to it but at the moment, I haven’t heard of anything new about it.

DRE: It would have been cool to see a cartoon.

DR: He was sincerely interested for a while there. When we had an opportunity to go with a major company, it turned out they wanted way too much of the pie and they wanted a lot of things for free that we didn’t want to give up. That was our shot at doing a web cartoon and we’d rather have the more creative control and the rights to it than we were willing to give up for what would have been a web cartoon ten years ago. They had a lot more money than we did and I think they expected us to take whatever they offered. We weren’t comfortable with letting go all our creative rights and things like that. They wanted my website and everything. They were going to do the web cartoons but they get the movie rights and the website name. I was like, “I own that website, you want my website, deal with me separately.” I spent all my own money and time developing that thing and I’m not giving it away.

DRE: You haven’t written anything since Space Beaver, any desire to write again?

DR: I have written since Space Beaver. I wrote and created Ripfire for the Malibu Ultraverse and I did backup stories for Spider-Man and the New Warriors at Marvel. I did Space Beaver when I was very young and just getting started and that’s mostly because no writer would work with me. I have some things that I’m developing. I have a real insecurity about my writing at this stage of the game because I’ve worked with people like Greg Rucka and Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis. I don’t want people opening up the comics and going, “I like the artwork but where did the story go?” If I do something it will be something that I feel very confident about. I’m stretched so far right now, just getting artwork done that my writing mostly happens in my head. I have dreams of doing more creator-owned stuff and I probably will write and draw another series eventually. But it’s not anything that’s happening soon.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Darick+Robertson/