Was it hard to switch from the Marvel style to the one you used in Fables?
For me it was sort of a natural progression, my style has been changing quite a lot at that time, the work that I was doing with Spider-Man was really different from the things that I have been doing for DC for example with Batman. I’ve had a lot of influence from Jack Kirby, and that was changing my approaching to the drawings, and it influenced what I was doing with Fable as well. But then again I began to introduce more design elements, like floral or organic elements, or borders at the side of the pages that made it look more like a children’s book rather than a comic. It was an evolution.
In your opinion what are the features that made Fables so different from any other comic and allowed it to gain the success it had?
I think that what helped was the fact that the readers already felt they knew all of these characters, because they have read children’s book. What makes it interesting was that we gave them a lot of backstories and enhanced details. But there was no continuity with any other comic, so it was good for the new readers too, because it could feel familiar, but also new. So that’s why we have a lot of new readers, especially women, because we also have very strong female characters.
Do you have a favourite character in Fable but also in everything you did so far?
From Fables there‘s The Flycatcher, which is my favourite character, I still think he’s the strongest character in the serie and I feel like I have a great affinity with it. Beyond that, there’s Rose Red who has the appearance of my wife, so she’s a very important character of course for me. And then another thing really important to me is all the natural environment and all the animals of the farm, because I created all of that stuff and I really like it.
Where did you find the inspiration to create Fables?
Well that’s difficult to say, I found inspiration from several sources, there wasn’t one specific thing that inspired me, but I tried not to watch movies while I was doing it, because I didn’t want any influence from media or other people’s interpretation of the books, but just reading all the books myself. Or sometimes I was just sitting and drawing and see what I could come up with.
Do you have other incoming projects?
Now that Fables has ended the next thing I’m going to do is Miracle Man. It’s a series we used to do 25 years ago, at the beginning of my career. It’s a project that spent a long time in limbo because our original publisher went bankrupt and it needed a long time to sort out the rights, but now we’re in a good situation because Marvel own the rights to the character now, so we can finally finish the story we started, and that will be my major work for the next year and a half.
We have a lot of fans who wants to, you know, follow your path and become artists. Would you like to give them some advice?
Well it takes a huge amount of commitment. If you want to have a career as an artist you really need to feel the need to draw, it has to be a part of you, like you need to eat, or drink, or sleep, you’re going to have the need to draw. And if you want to draw comics, storytelling is the most important part. It’s not just about drawing pretty pictures, if you want to work in the comics, it’s all about the tale, choose how do you want to take the reader in the journey, that’s the most crucial part and that’s what you need to study. And also, if you’re young you won’t worry about these things but, get yourself a good chair to sit in where you work because you’re going to regret it later on when you’re older (laughs).
One last question: do you believe in crowdfunding as the future of publishing, since a lot of young artists are using it, often with great results?
I think it’s an useful and very successful way of bringing new artists to public attention, but I think that there’s still plenty of opportunities to find work in major publishers too. In fact it’s probably a good time to find work in a major house because the big publishers seem to be looking for new talents more than ever at the moment, since they’re producing a lot of books. But yes, if you’re starting out it’s a really good instrument.
Article by Pasquale Sada and Gabriele Atero di Biase
