Seeds: How did you get involved with “The Walking Dead?”

Charlie Adlard: [Series writer] Robert [Kirkman] emailed me out of the blue asking me if I’d be interested in drawing “The Walking Dead.” I did know Robert a couple years before; we worked on a comic book indirectly with another writer, Joe Casey. We did a comic book called “Code Flesh” for Image. We did 8 episodes; it wasn’t a full comic book. Image only published the first 5, so it was just hanging there, and I already drew them all. And Robert offered to publish those with his independent small press company Funk-O-Tron. That’s how I got to know Robert, and I met him a couple of times at various conventions, so when he emailed me I knew who he was.



Seeds: How do you and Robert collaborate on “The Walking Dead?”

CA: I get as much freedom as I would like as an artist, short of writing it myself. His scripts are very loose, to be honest. And I think the more we’ve got to work together the looser they become. Subsequently, because he trusts me to do my job, like I trust him to do his job. They are, as the business calls it “full scripts,” so it’s not like when Stan Lee worked with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee would write a vague outline for Jack Kirby and Jack, as a controversial point, wrote the comic himself.

There’s enough information in our scripts for me to do what Robert needs to put down, but the rest is totally up to me. Which is how I want it, and it’s a great working collaboration. We sort of leave each other alone, basically; we’re both incredibly busy and can’t afford the time to be emailing or on the phone with each other all the time. So we both need to be very professional as well. We have to trust each other to do a good job each month; otherwise the whole thing goes to pot.



Seeds: So when you see the script, how do you decide what to draw, or what to put into an image?

CA: In a script all the dialogue is there. Personally, I find working from a full script artistically more freeing than an outline… because you’ve got all the information down for you, and there’s no sort of discrepancy where the writer says, “I really wanted that there,” and you say, “Well, you should have put that in the outline.” There’s a lot of room for mistakes.

On average, Robert’s description will be either large panel or small panel. He doesn’t even define the exact sizes, or the shape or anything. That’s all up to me. A lot of it could literally be a couple of words of the description; it can be as simple as a closeup on whomever. If there’s something he specifically wants, he will put it down. I’d say your average script would be: X talks to Y, close up on Y, close up on X, wide panel, both in shot. Robert said when we started, don’t take these scripts as “this is how it must be done,” feel free to mess around with them. Which I do quite often.



Seeds: Could you talk about a comic book artist’s average workday?

CA: Very basically, a script goes to an artist. Especially in American comic books there tends to be a penciler and an inker. I do both jobs, pencil and ink, mostly because I’m too much of a control freak to let anyone else touch it. Basically, because me and Robert work for ourselves, and because Robert trusts me enough, I ink without him ever seeing the pages. So the first time Robert sees the pages is when they’re finished. So he trusts me enough to where I can do that. There is a slight thing with time. If I was stopping between pencils and ink to show Robert, it would slow me up, and it would slow Robert up. And we’ve built trust.

But I’m sure in other Comic book companies… they will send pencils in first, make sure everything looks fine, then goes to ink. But when I get the pencil and ink done, the page gets sent to Cliff, who is our gray-toner. Even though I do have time for pencils and inks, I don’t have time for the gray tones. Because “The Walking Dead” is a black and white book, the tones of gray add a little something to the artwork, I think. The book then goes to a letterer, who letters the script and then to the printer.

My day is very simple. I get up at 7 o’clock in the morning, I make sure my two kids get off to school. I get into the studio around half past 8. Procrastinate for about an hour. Then I work a very basic 9-5 day. For the last 5 to 6 years, that’s been about it.



Seeds: How much would you say you get done in a day?

CA: This is of no indication of an average artist… but I have reputation in the industry of being one of the fastest artists. I can generally do – and this is hard to quantify because I pencil them first and ink them after – but I would say that I complete two pages a day. And I do them quite small. I think the average normal size of an average American Comic book artwork is… I don’t know how to say it because Americans go by inches. But I draw around the same size of the comic, where other artists do a bigger page. And that was a decision made about halfway through “The Walking Dead” to try and do it faster.



Seeds: You’ve worked with Nobel Prize winner for literature Doris Lessing. Could you talk about how the drawing process worked with her versus a comic book writer, like Robert?

CA: This is a little bit of an interesting story. Doris Lessing is not a comic book writer. Believe it or not, the idea for getting her to do a comic initially started as: let’s get some famous authors to do comic books so we could get this great crossover thing, where people who read books by this author would now buy a comic book, and vice versa. Great idea if implemented right, and if the right person was writing. But not everyone can write comic books, and not every comic book writer can write novels.

So when I got the script of “Playing the Game,” it was nine pages long, and I had to do a 64-page book. It was not only nine pages long, but written in verse as well. There was hardly any panel descriptions, it was sort of a poem version of a Stan Lee script. It was just the most bizarre thing. I found out after accepting the job that every other artist friend of mine had been offered the script and they turned it down. So I literally had to sit there for a couple of days and figure out how to expand this thing to 64 pages. So in effect I wrote half of it. It was radically different, to be honest. It was a tricky one to do. A lot of it was trying to figure out what she was going on about, and perhaps I was being ignorant because I couldn’t work out what she was trying to say. I talked to some other artists, and they couldn’t figure it out. It just wasn’t me. It was just the bizarrest thing to do.



Seeds: Going back to “The Walking Dead”: Tony Moore was the original artist, and you were hired after 6 issues. Did you try to mimic Tony, or did you try to do your own thing?

CA: I did my own thing. I gathered that Robert picked me because I didn’t draw like Tony Moore. There are plenty of guys who draw more like him, so why not ask them first if that’s what he wanted? So I just assumed that he didn’t care that it didn’t look anything like Tony’s. I also wasn’t going to compromise. I assume if someone is ringing me up, they know my artwork. So I presume that they know what I do, and I presume that Robert wouldn’t ask me to draw like somebody else.



Seeds: You’ve been working on “The Walking Dead” since 2004. Do you ever get burnt out?

CA: No, not really. I constantly get fantastic scripts from Robert to provide inspiration. Because of my speed and everything, a project could last 3 to 4 weeks, and that could be frustrating – I’m just getting used to a character and I’m moving on to the next thing. I enjoy an ongoing process, and I enjoy getting to know the characters. It’s nice to be able to draw Rick in my sleep. I know every nuance in his face, so it’s great. And “The Walking Dead” keeps me locked in because it’s so good. It’s as simple as that. I’m just as intrigued to see where Robert is going to take it in the next issues. It is a weird sort of feeling to know that we’re locked into this for a very long time.



Seeds: Do you and Robert have a timetable with “The Walking Dead?”

CA: We do, we talk about that when we physically talk to each other. Which is unfortunately getting rarer, because of the busy-ness of being us. I’m sorta stuck turning the pages and Robert is doing his thing and the T.V. show, so we probably get to talk a couple of times a year. When we get together, we do talk about more long term stuff. Because there just isn’t the time in the day when we’re emailing each other, but that’s usually just a couple of sentences here and there. I have a very rough idea of what Robert has planned; though he’s done this to me before, where he tells me what he has planned, and it changes when it gets to that point.

Interview by: Gabriel Potter

