Volume 1, Issue 1 – October 1998

Bernie Wrightson: Painting Stories

Where the lines of art, illustration and narrative meet, there you’ll find Bernie Wrightson. Co-creator of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, and celebrated interpreter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Steven King’s The Stand, Wrightson has carved a unique reputation for himself as a visual storyteller. Last month in Atlanta, Crescent Blues persuaded him to share some of those stories with us.

Crescent Blues: Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and how you got your start as an artist?

Bernie Wrightson: I was born in Baltimore and grew up there. My first job in commercial art was with the Baltimore Sun. I worked there less than a year – nine, 10 months. Then I moved to New York and started drawing comic books — and stayed in New York. I never went back to Baltimore.

Did you always want to draw comics?

Comics were one of the things that I always wanted to do. I grew up with EC Horror Comics. But it wasn’t just comics. I wanted to do comics and illustrations and movies — all different sorts of things. Comics were just a part of it.

But narrative art, telling a story graphically, speaks to you in a special way.

Absolutely. I love the whole process of storytelling. That’s one of the things I really love about comics. One of the things I really love about movies; it’s a storytelling medium. Very often in a lot of my single image pictures, I try to have the picture tell a story, or at least suggest some kind of narrative.

Do you prefer telling the story with a group of pictures or in a single image?

It depends on the story that I’m trying to tell. Some stories can be told very simply, and they can be told better in a single picture. Other stories really need the space and the scope of page after page of many images.

How do you make that determination? Is it because someone hands you a story and says illustrate this, or is this something you choose to do?

Sometimes I’m given an assignment where I’m given a script or a story outline. In that case, it’s usually pre-determined — this is given to me by a comic book company to do, so of course I’ll do a comic book. A lot of the single image things that I’ve done have been my own ideas.

What about the Frankenstein illustrations? Was that a project you developed from the beginning?

That was completely my own. Frankenstein was always very deep in my consciousness. My mother took me to see a Frankenstein movie when I was really young, and it affected me very deeply. It really scared me. It really fascinated me. That led to seeing all the other Frankenstein movies, led to reading the book, and I developed a life-long love affair with Frankenstein and anything associated with it. Illustrating the book had always been a dream of mine. I always wanted to see that story — Mary Shelley’s book — illustrated faithfully.

It’s a fascinating book, and the story’s seldom told in its entirety.

There’s so much more to it than what we’ve seen in the movies.

The book created the resonance that created the myth that created the movies.

Exactly. When you think it was written almost 200 years ago, and it’s still as popular as ever. I think, aside from the Bible, there’s no other book that’s not been out of print since it was first published. I might be wrong there or maybe overstating this.

Copies were always for sale, and some version of the book was always being made into a play, movie or television show.

It still is. It’s a pretty wonderful thing — it’s a pretty extraordinary thing — to think that this book, originally published in 1818, has never been out of public eye. Each generation that comes along is introduced to this.

Other than movies, Frankenstein and Alphonse Mucha, what or who were your principal influences?

Probably my biggest influences were Frank Frazetta, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth, Franklin Booth, J. C. Colle. A lot of comic book artists: Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, Roy Krenkel. Just on and on and on. I hate to start naming them, because there are so many I know I’m forgetting.

In the Frankenstein illustrations, you use a lot of cross-hatching and very intricate detail not found in some of your other images. Is that a question of medium or is it a matter of preference?

It’s a little of both: medium and preference. The Frankenstein drawings are the only body of work I’ve done with a pen. Most everything else I’ve done with a brush.

Sable brush versus airbrush versus?

Sable brush — like a watercolor brush. The brush doesn’t lend itself to the detail you can get with a pen. I chose working with a pen on the Frankenstein drawings, because I wanted them to have the pretense of looking like woodcuts or steel engravings. Something that would echo a little more closely the printing techniques of the time that Frankenstein was first published.

So the drawings could be bound, and a person could look at it and say this is how they should’ve been done.

Right.

You also illustrated The Stand. Was that an assignment or something you initiated?

The illustrations for the unabridged edition of The Stand were commissioned by Steven King himself. He wanted to see…the full book illustrated. They were done with a combination of brush and pen.

I remember having a hard time getting into the illustrations, how to visualize them. For some reason, I just stalled. I didn’t get into them and start to cook until I started to think of them in terms of comic book covers. Once I was able to think of each illustration in terms of a single cover, the composition and actual visualization began to come together.

Do you ever work in other media besides color wash and ink?

I’ve worked in just about every medium. I would say my favorite is working with pencil, drawing with a pencil. My least favorite is painting with oil. And everything else falls in between them.

What is it that you like so much about working with pencil?

I like the way the lines appear on the paper and images just seem to appear almost magically. To this day I can’t walk through a shopping mall or the boardwalk at the beach without stopping if there’s a person doing caricatures or portraits. I will just stop and watch. I have to be physically pulled away. I just love watching pictures happen.

I love making the pictures. I feel sometimes that I’m two people. There’s that person there with the hand that’s making the picture, and the person standing back, watching, saying: “Wow, look at that!”

When you’ve got an idea in your head, whether for a single image picture, or a full page lay-out for a comic book, how do you approach the page? What’s important to you?

I’ll crib a line from Georgia O’Keeffe: the most important thing to me when I’m doing a picture is to fill a space in a beautiful way. It’s arguable whether a lot of my images are beautiful. But I think there’s beauty in form and composition and color and tone and light and shadow. The image that is actually being depicted is secondary to that.

Which now having heard myself say that, I can say it’s actually bull.

It’s hard for me to say. I always start with a picture in my head that I want to transfer to paper. The problem is somewhere on the highway between my head to my fingertips, the transmission breaks down. What I’m drawing on paper is never as good as the picture I see in my head. Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. It keeps me trying to do better each time.

On a completely different track, you worked on Ghostbusters I and II.

I did some monster designs for them.

As a graphic artist or did you get into the modeling?

Just on paper. Not everything I did was used — I think 90 percent was not. Partly because I was working from a first draft screenplay, a lot of which was changed and never made it into the movie. They turned over a lot of the designs I did to other artists for refinement and tweaking. All that’s really left in the movie of mine is some of the proportions of the dogs and the librarian at the beginning — the first ghost.

Have you done other movie work?

I worked on several movies that haven’t been produced. I did over a hundred drawings and character designs for “Shadows over Innsmouth,” an H. P. Lovecraft story that was never made into a movie.

Most recently, I did some monster designs for a movie called The Faculty, which is coming out around Christmas time. It’s directed by Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, El Marachi, From Dusk Til Dawn) and has a screenplay by Kevin Williamson who wrote Scream. In a few words, it’s basically The Thing meets Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in high school.

What’s next for you?

Currently I’m finishing up a Punisher project for Marvel Knights that will be appearing, starting this month and running through December. After that, I don’t have any plans for working in comics for a while. What I’d really like to do is break out and work more in movies and film-related projects, just because I’m pretty much burned-out on comics for right now. This happens periodically. I’ve been working exclusively in comics for several years and would really like to put that aside and try something else. I feel like I’m really stale.

You can’t stay in one spot.

You have to stimulate yourself. You have to as the Jefferson Airplane said, “Feed your head.”

Or feed your soul as the case may be.

Or just grow. You have to have the capacity to grow. A lot of people don’t have the opportunity or capacity. Those who do are the lucky ones.