



...and then something happened. An interivew with Bill Sienkiewicz by Henrik Andreasen By Katherine Keller

January 14, 2008

I met Henrik Andreasen at my first SDCC standing in line at the Dark Horse booth. We never plan to meet up at any convention, but a combination of tastes, mutual friends, and the fact that we're both journalists means that invariably, we do.



Recently, he made a very generous offer to Sequential Tart  would we be interested in running the English versions of several interviews previously published in Danish? Sequential Tart is very pleased to be the first English language publisher of these interviews with some of Comics' greatest creators.



This interview is copyright Henrik Andreasen, and was conducted at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1998. Published in Bild & Bubbla no. 150 Fall 2000.





Henrik Andreasen: How did the interest in comics  and the fascination with Neal Adams in particular  come about?



Bill Sienkiewicz: The interest in comics has been there ever since I was very young I loved comics. I used to read Curt Swan's Superman and a lot of the Batman stories and everything else like that. I wasn't that big into the Marvel superheroes. I used to read the newspaper strips, and I liked reading them and drawing them, because I liked the fact that you could create a whole world and tell stories. It was just the idea that I was in infinity immediately, like a connection to storytelling through comics that I just had, right from the beginning  it felt like I had found my niche.



When I was seven years old, I told my father I was going to draw comic books for a living, which upset him greatly  he wanted me to be an electrician. Which is why, later on, when I would do posters using wiring and that kind of stuff, it was a little tip of the hat to some of the pieces I had done working with him.



When I first saw Neal Adams' work (doing covers for DC ) as a kid, I hated it. Later on I developed a love for Neal's work, and I went from hating it to loving it. And because I was alone a lot during my childhood, not that I didn't have any friends, but Neal's artwork was what really kept me going. I wanted to draw like him, and there was something about it that spoke to me and was really life saving for me. So his work became much more than artwork to me, it became a passion and a need. Ever since I was very young I devoured his artwork and tried to copy it, I did also look at other artists, but Neal was the main focus.



It wasn't until I started doing Moon Knight and finally met Neal Adams, that the backlash started. I grew up with people not being aware of Neal's artwork, they just knew that I was doing comic books, so they didn't see the similarities to his work. But when I started doing comics professionally, the criticism of me being a clone came immediately. Neal was, and has always been very wonderful and supportive, but The Comics Journal and other professionals was saying that it was as if I learned to draw from Neal Adams and Neal Adams only. The criticism invalidated what I struggled for my whole childhood after I decided to be an artist. I never thought in terms of being an imitator, it was just something I wanted to do, and needed to do in order to survive. I wanted to be able to draw as well and move people in the way that Neal's work had moved me, so when the criticism came back I felt invisible. Everything I had worked for up until that point became invalid and destroyed, and I felt like I had no identity because I had thrown my identity into Neal's work.



So from that point on, somewhere around issue 25 of Moon Knight , right before I hit it, I started to try out other things and look at different illustrators and soaked up all the things I had missed, or seen in art school. I felt like a sponge soaking up things from all kinds of sources and trusting my own voice, my own vision a little bit more.



So I went from being a clone to trying so many different things. Because comics was viewed as an art form not worthy of respect, especially where I grew up, I thought that the only way to make them respectful, was to do something I felt good about, and that meant trying collage and that kind of things. I wasn't trying to change anything, I was just trying to validate what I was doing. To show other people, and also my father and mother, that it wasn't a waste of energy.



HA: Wasn't it strange going from your safe Neal Adams world, into putting bits and pieces of everybody else's work into your own work  making you sort of a split personality?



BS: It was more than strange, it was an incredible period of deconstruction, it was probably one of the worst periods of my life at that point, but it was an absolutely essential period of transition. I went from wanting to do work like Neal, to wanting to do work not like Neal. And yet in the equation, Neal having been such a powerful figure to me, Neal was as powerful in the negative as he had been in the positive. It was a difficult transition for me, and I see it in a lot of other artists coming up whom I have influenced, and I can understand it  I just hope they are also able to move on. I have a really good relationship with Neal today, and when I look at his work I don't think I could have chosen a better mentor/style.



HA: Was that some of the things Stray Toasters was about? I thought that you disguised a very straightforward story in layer upon layer of different art styles. That together with it being placed in the future, was that to confuse the reader and avoid trouble, with the story focusing on a very controversial subject  the dysfunctional family?



BS: That was in there as well. I always liked SF, and setting it in the future was a way to deal with some personal issues that I had to deal with. Part of the whole idea of Stray Toasters had more to do with me growing up fixing television sets when I was younger  a teenager. I used to go to people's houses and check their tubes, television actually had tubes, fixing people's radios, their wiring and that sort of thing.



I decided that the toasters were a metaphor for me, something that's electrical that you plug in. You put the toast, the bread or the bagel in it, and it warms up and does as it is supposed to do, and when you do not need it anymore you leave it on the counter. And I sort of felt that in a dysfunctional family, that's how the parents treat their children, as appliances. Something to warm up and provide the parents with something, when it is actually the parents' job to provide for the child. So that was sort of the underlined meaning, that idea of a child creating his adult version of a monster i.e. "Big Daddy"  creating his own child version of what a daddy is. I firmly intended to do my actual childhood, but in a much more straightforward kind of story, something like a Harvey Pekar or Art Spiegelman story, without being like that.



I think I removed myself enough from the SF to tell a straightforward story that deals with an absolute psychopath, someone who has no trouble killing animals. And what children need to do, and what I need to do, to find all that okay, even though that it wasn't, is to find a place where you are safe. Comics was my place to be safe and in control when I was growing up, because so much of what was around me wasn't.



HA: Did you feel that you were finding your own voice doing Stray Toasters ?



BS: More and more. It was the most exhilarating and most frightening experience of my life. I felt I was uncharted. I was way out on a limb and there were times I even felt I was floating away from anything that was familiar. There is an exhilaration and excitement in that, because it is our own individual place and voice, and a statement of: "hey I am here and I exist on the planet now and this is what I have to say". And at the same time there is nothing familiar about it, so all of the connections we have with the world and to other people are cut  I felt very afraid as well. It was a mix and I love it, I love that feeling as scary as it can be, I admire people who can face that and do that.



HA: Another big project of yours, besides all the "work for hire" work you have done, is the Jimi Hendrix project Voodoo Child . Did that project come about due to an interest in Jimi Hendrix, or was a more general interest in music  and do you get inspired by that medium?



BS: The Hendrix book was a mixed experience again  most of them are, with the exception being Elektra Assassin . That was also a freighting experience, it was in a whole different avenue of black unfamiliarities (I will get back to your question shortly), but working with Frank (Miller) was the single most exhilarating and fun experience. I also had a lot of fun when I worked with D.G. Chichester on Moby Dick , it was a joy ride.



As for the Hendrix book; I love music and I like Hendrix, but I was not fanatical about his music. But I felt that comics as a metaphor for music could work, in terms of cutting loose and really doing something storywise. I anticipated doing a lot of that, but the publisher of the book did not want to push it as much as I wanted to. So consequently the whole project to me is something I do not see as what it became, but what it could have become. Not that I'm not proud of it, but I feel, if I'm being generous, that it is fifty to sixty percent of what I ultimately saw it to be, in terms of really pushing it the way I wanted to. Working on a book about Jimi Hendrix, what better place and icon to cut loose on? That was more an indication of me not wanting to play it safe, except I was working with someone who did.



The response to that book was very good, very positive  the CD with the music. A lot of people told me they were actually listening to the music while reading the book. Some of the most fun and interesting parts to do were the bits of him as a child meeting his father, and of course all the icon images of him  with Pete Townsend  playing Woodstock  burning his guitar in Monterey . That was an interesting slip into mainstream, comics as mainstream.



HA: Isn't that one of the main problem with comics, even though they have progressed a lot the past 10 years, that they are still too mainstream. With you working on the edge, what do you feel needs to be done in order to push the medium and expand the market? Because there is such a great potential in comics, in terms of Voodoo Child , as interesting as it was, if you say that there is forty to fifty percent lacking then there is still so much more to give.



BS: I agree, and the only thing to do is to take the forty percent that wasn't there and apply it to something else. And I think that the level of sitting on my hands  metaphorically, so to speak  is taking that energy that is built up, like static electricity, and to find a place or project that will allow me to push it all the way through. It may be pushing through in a different way, but it is still the energy that translates into the intensity of the story, or the truth of the story  or integrity of the story. I sort of find that publishers are playing it safe, they are looking for more sure things.



HA: But you have to take chances in order to expand the market. You will not find new readers going down the same avenues.



BS: Absolutely. You are basically feeding the same vein, doing variations on the same theme. I have done enough of that  all the inking I have done as "work for hire" is simply that. As I amass more of the things I want to do  directions for what I want to do, putting together a big project where I'm finally out on a limb again. The work I have done on the Santa Claus book, the Hendrix book, and a number of movie projects, television and album covers, are all facets of what I do. But I'm looking for a job/project that will do for comics, for me, what all those avenues provide. I actually see comics, more so than movies, to have the great capacity to do many things at the same time. And I think we just barely scratched the surface.



HA: Looking back at your career, do you now feel you have found your own voice, and is ready to take the next step and expand your vision and comics per-se?



BS: I hope so. Taking Elektra Assassin , Stray Toasters or the Hendrix book as an example, with all of these books I was trying out a lot of things that did not necessarily work. Some of the things I was trying out just to try them out, because I was new and I was feeling a sense of wanting to explore. Not all of it was appropriate for the story, some of it was, some of it wasn't and some of it was more subconscious.



I want to find the right note, the right musical instrument to play and the right volume to play it at, for what the story is. It is like knowing when to pull out the big guns and when to be quiet. It is showing, hopefully, elements of maturity and restraint when it is called for, and not just simply showing shots of playing when it takes you out of the story.



I have that problem with a lot of movies now. Movies have become what comics used to be  spectacles, special effects with very little story. I'm tired of reading about reviews that criticize the movie's dialogue, storytelling or the violence in it, by saying that it is a comic book style violence or story. I like to see the opposite, where if you see a bad movie, it will say that it is bad movie dialogue  should it say that the movie had a comic book style dialogue, that text would have a very lofty wonderful meaning.



Just like movies do adaptations, I did an adaptation of a great novel, Moby Dick , but I feel I will never do another Moby Dick . I want there to be more illustrated classics created in comics, not adaptations, like Maus  or something like Frank's Dark Knight . A lot is certainly being done by the underground/independent artists  I think Kyle Baker is amazing. It is great to go and find a work of art that you can't get anyplace else, that have the value and intelligence that comics unfortunately aren't known for. The exception in mainstream comics could be somebody like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman and a couple of others.



HA: What are you working on at the moment, besides your "work for hire"?



BS: Right now I'm working on a lot of different things  it is like a series of balloons filled with all kinds of ideas, where I'm trying to find the appropriate place to do them. Mentally, I'm thinking of an anthology.



I have worked in so many styles over the years, and I would like to do a book, where I'm telling one story over the course of the series where each storyline is done in a specific style. So each storyline would have a different approach, a different technique, a different target that I'm aiming at. Trying to diversify, a sort of theme album, like an album done by different musicians. The cohesion comes from the fact that is one performer, one artist or one group, and thematically it will revolve around one thing. Rather than doing one job where I'm doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that, I think I'm looking for a little bit more of a follow through. So that is what I'm aiming for, and I got a number of additional things that I'm setting up right now in terms of trying different stylistic things for myself. I'm trying different styles to see if it fits the story, and if it feels right I will go with it. I'm able to leave it open, where there is all these restrictions doing commercial work, where with this there are no rules and I'm allowing myself to play. I can just push it and see what happens, and if it works that's great, and if it doesn't then it doesn't. But the point is, I will allow it to happen.



HA: So the future looks promising?



BS: More than ever. I feel like I'm brand new again. Elektra Assassin and Stray Toasters happened 10 years ago, and it is nice to have done them, and that they are a part of my past, but I feel like I just took baby steps with that. Hopefully the future looks bright for comics, even though they have been predicting the death of comics since the fifties at least.



HA: Okay, I think we will leave it at that.



[Editor's Note: Several minor copy edits were made to Andreasen's original transcripts for the purposes of grammar and syntax.]

