While at Esozone, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with

href="http://bluecollarillustrator.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Ian

Mcewan, a comic artist whose work I’ve been enjoying since I first

encountered it several months ago. So as soon as the smoke after the event

cleared, I gave him a ring and lined up an interview with him for you folks-

giving some insight into his work, and a free cbr of the first issue of

Invader…

Esozone: Arte, Music, & Magick panel. (Run by

href="http://bluecollarillustrator.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Ian

Mcewan, Featuring

target="_blank">John Harrigan,

target="_blank">Wes Unruh,

target="_blank">myself, and

href="http://www.diabolusrex.com/artist/bio.html" target="_blank">Rex).

Can you give me a little of the dirt on Invader? How it got started, and

who you’re collaborating with?

The writer’s name is

target="_blank">Andrew West. He’s a long time friend of mine, and when I

decided to get serious about drawing comics, he simply said, “Take a look at

this… wanna draw mine?” I read it, liked it, and that was pretty much

that. He’s been great to work with, and always open to what I have to say,

which can be a lot sometimes.

Definitely.

Invader is the first full comics work from both of us, aside from

some assist inking I did on a small press comic, and another project that

got scrapped half way through illustration with another writer.

That’s surprising to me because your comic style is fairly developed. I

know a lot of artists that take a while to develop in sequential

storytelling, if at all, it really is a different perspective.

From what I’ve seen of your comic work, all of it is characterized first and

foremost by clean lines and solid composition. Do you have plans in the

future of working with a colorist, or are you sticking to black and

white?

Invader was always meant to be colored, and unfortunately we just haven’t

found anyone to do it yet. With the hallucinogenic nature of this issue

particularly, color was key, and I used sparse line art to better enhance

the eventual coloring job. I understand that publishers often provide

colorists, but we’re also still looking. I do also love line based art

though, like the work of Moebius, Geoff Darrow, and more recently Stuart

Immonen and the late Seth Fisher. Fisher was a big influence on me, and over

a half hour talk with him, gave me the best artistic insight I’ve ever

received.

There’s an elegance to line art that attracts to me to it, even though it

might take me forever and a day to lay out so many perspective grids,

because I can’t hide things with shadow as much.

Conversely, I do like the heightened drama of stark, monochromatic styles,

and I really want to work on something more down to earth and noir-ish at

some point. That will probably seem obvious to people when they see the last

three pages of issue 1, where I go shadow crazy in the military base.

When I first read your comic, I noticed you begin really in the

beginning. I mean, the protagonist essentially relives the birth of the

Universe, or that’s how I saw it- before the final frame, where he’s in the

world we are all more or less familiar with, hitchhiking his way to LA. That

kind of made me think of Qabbalah, where you have all of these layers of

abstraction, essentially, which become more and more material, until they

finally manifest in the final form, which is the material world… and of

course that’s the only ‘world’ most people are even aware of. Did you guys

have that in mind as well?”

Yeah, actually. Andy studies magical concepts, including Qabbalah. He

planned the movements of the book in accordance with those principles. Some

are specific like, Qabbalah. Another example would be during the

hallucination sequence, where he’s essentially reaching the end of the

Tarot. He comes across the Moon, then the Sun, cut in by the peak of the

trip with seeing an angel, and resuming with the Aeon, and ending with a

couple literally making love on the surface of card 22 of Crowley’s Thoth

deck: The Universe. There’s more general magical winks packed in there too,

recurring sacred numbers and mystical geometry, and an overall Thelemic tone

to it all. So from the beginning, this was meant to be a magically informed

science fiction action comic.

Certainly there’s some precedent for that with comics like Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles

and Alan Moore’s Promethea…

Well, they work well together. Comics have always dealt with mythic

archetypes, not to mention the use of magic as entertainment. And even

Doctor Strange has quoted Crowley, I believe. But since books like The

Invisbles and Promethea, and even before with Bryan Talbot’s

Adventures of Luther Arkwright, occult and meta-fictional themes are

showing up in comics everywhere. Warren Ellis plays a lot with these ideas

in his work, he’s just less transparent than others. This stuff is

everywhere now, and Invader is going to be kind of a Jack Kirby-er

type of occult action book. The next issue gets very ‘power cosmic’ and

pushes the action to ramming speed.

For those not as familiar with his work, could you talk a little bit about

the Thoth deck, and how it might be used artistically to explore

psychological themes? I know I’ve found it invaluable for that purpose-

probably far more than divination of any kind- but I’m curious what your

take on that is?

I definitely use it more for study than divination, although I do that too.

A primary part of tarot is that it’s essentially an illustrated deck of

psychological archetypes. Freida Harris – who painted the Thoth deck under

Crowley’s instruction – created some of the most vivid and intense

depictions of what these archetypes represent visually that I’ve ever seen.

Some of her depictions – and while Crowley mapped them out, I’ve always

believed Harris added more to it than she gets credit for – can be

unbelievably blunt and in your face at times. I’m still intimidated by The

Tower in this deck. And it’s supposed to intimidate, because this card

depicts the collapsing of one of your paradigms, like death on the

ideological end of things. When everything you knew previously, everything

that comfortably guided you through your day is proven wrong and some level

of brain change occurs, it can be violent. It may need to be violent to

shock you out of the passivity that keeps you in a state you don’t want to

be in.

Yes, I got a lot out of that too. You still never can fully prepare for

when it happens, for real, in your life though…

So yeah, I recommend studying Tarot imagery to artists to better inform

their art. Especially illustration, and I’m only beginning to play with

this, but I can depict emotional states
more vividly when I associate a related card to it. Say, even in a generic

superhero story, a villain’s plot is foiled. He has an EPIC FAIL moment,

where he’s enthralled in the feeling that all is lost. If I want to depict

that moment, I’d keep in mind the ten of swords, which Crowley also called

“Ruin”. And for the hero who just saved the day, probably major 19: The Sun,

Resplendant triumph and joy.

I’m assuming, based on how you leave it off, that this is meant to be the

first in a series?

Yes, it’s meant to be ongoing. Andy is insane with how he’s thought this

through, and last time I talked to him about it, he already had 40+ issues

roughly laid out. So I guess it goes under the heading of a Vertigo style

long-form but finite series, like The Invisibles,

Transmetropolitan, and Preacher.

How much art direction do you get in the script? I mean is it like an

Alan Moore style sprawling manuscript, or are you left more or less to your

own devices?

Pretty much my own devices. He was very specific about imagery, but only

content-wise. All of the designing was up to me except the main character. A

typical script page would outline the number of panels and what would take

place, with an occasional suggestion about camera angle. Although before I

moved to Portland, we were roommates, so he was always around if I had a

question. Overall, Andy likes to see what the artist can come up with

themselves, which was no small task for a book with other dimensions, peyote

trips, and living space ships. My left and right brains were in a constant

fist fight, trying to conceptualize the imagery, while logically keeping in

pace with the narrative.

Yeah I can see that at once being very free-ing, but also somewhat

frustrating. My style with writing comic scripts seems to fall somewhere in

the middle, I try to give a fair amount of information but resist forcing

the artist to represent it in the exact way I’m visualizing it- because they

might just come up with something better. With something as abstract as

this, yeah, that can be tricky. When all is said and done, do you have

release plans for this comic?

We’re sending submission packets to publishers right now. We want someone to

publish it, rather than do it ourselves. I don’t think I have the strength

for that quite yet. If it doesn’t get picked up, then we rethink what we

want to do with it.

The endless battle- you finish the work, and then the real work

begins, right? Well, I’m not going to try to convert you to small press or

self publishing- everything has it’s downside, it’s just a question of what

direction you’re going to get sucker punched. And anyway, I’ve already

tried. Finally, what sucked you into visual arts in the first place?

I’m spatially oriented by nature, which led me to drawing throughout my

life. I think visually, so my ideas tend to urge me to want to see them

physically. And being able to generate an image that looks three

dimensional, when it’s really not, is appealing. That “Ceci n’est pas une

pipe” feeling, that your eye is seeing one thing, and your mind is turning

into something else. Comics especially, since the panel form of illustration

forces your mind to continue generating narrative between the moments we

choose to illustrate, as artists.

Download issue 1 of Invader here (.cbz format).