MichaelDoran
11-10-2002, 01:34 PM
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/orbiter.jpg" target="_blank"><img width="200" height="167" align="right" src="http://classic.newsarama.com/DC/RRP/orbiter_t.jpg" border="0" alt="ORBITOR by Colleen Doran"></a>Originally published in July 2002:
Attendees of the “Evolving Vertigo” panel at last weekend’s WizardWorld Chicago convention got to see creator Colleen Doran in rare form. When asked to speak about her work on the upcoming Warren Ellis-written original graphic novel, Orbiter, Doran positively gushed, excitedly speaking about the research she’s done for the project, adopting a new style for the story, and how it was a dream for her thanks to her long-time fascination with NASA, and all things space-related. As she spoke and became more excited, Doran’s Southern accent began to seep through, leaving the audience with a description of the project peppered with “y’all’s.” Newsarama tracked the creator down to talk about just what she has up her sleeve for Orbiter, and what has her so excited.
First off, Orbiter will be one of Ellis’ first projects coming out from DC under his new exclusive contract with the publisher. Story-wise, the graphic novel is set ten years after the space shuttle Venture and its crew of seven disappeared from earth orbit. Already on shaky public relations ground, the disaster ended human space flight, forcing NASA to commit itself to robotic exploration only.
NASA abandons Kennedy Space Center for financial as well as practical reasons, and the once-time spaceport is taken over by the homeless castoffs of society, who’ve built a huge tent city on the grounds. All is quiet for ten years, and then the Venture returns, landing at Kennedy, with only one of it’s crew still alive, albeit insane.
The shuttle is augmented by instrumentation it didn’t have when it left a decade earlier, it’s covered with an organic skin, and has Martian dust on its undercarriage. Orbiter is the story of what happened to its crew, and where the Venture went.
Probably best known for her fantasy-esque creator-owned series A Distant Soil, the news of Doran teaming with Ellis on what sounded like a hard science fiction story raised a few eyebrows among both fans and editors alike. Ellis and Doran (and the project’s original editor Heidi MacDonald) persevered, and the artist threw herself into research.
“Something like A Distant Soil would require an awful lot of research over a protracted period of time,” Doran explained. “Orbiter required an enormous amount of research over a very short period of time – I spent probably about three weeks doing nothing but studying. I spent over $500 on models, reference books, and everything I would need to draw the shuttle accurately, understand how it works.
“I didn’t think it would be a good idea to make the same mistakes I’d seen so many other people make, such as showing the shuttle flying with the bottom towards the earth – the tiles always face towards the sun. If I’m showing it taking off, I need to be able to understand how it rolls, and different things like which rockets fire first, and which of the rocket boosters fall off first. They’re the kind of things that would drive me crazy if I would draw them incorrectly – I just needed to make sure that I got them right.”
And a quick look at a Googled image of the space shuttle wasn’t going to be enough. As Doran learned, there are subtle design changes with each new shuttle, so as a result, the original shuttle, Columbia bears only superficial resemblance to the newest, Atlantis. “The landing gear is different, the control ports have been changed, the NASA ‘worm’ used to be painted on the shuttle, now it’s the meatball,” Doran explained. “There are a hundred little things that I could really screw up if I wasn’t paying attention, so I immersed myself in the subject as much as I could.”
Okay – it’s a safe bet that there are more than a few readers thinking, “So?” at this point. Is it a lot of trouble for nothing? Obviously, Doran doesn’t think so, and that fact affects her approach to her entire craft and all her work.
“It’s just lazy ass not to get it right,” Doran said. “It’s important to me, because we’re telling a story and creating a world for the reader. Why should we do a sloppy job? I can’t stand sloppy work, and to me, poor research is sloppy work. When a reader picks this thing up, I want them to know that I’ve done the very best I could do. They’re getting their money’s worth.
“As a science fiction fan myself, when I go to a movie, and I see really lousy science, it ruins the experience for me, and I have a hard time seriously – not that you can take too many science fiction films seriously. For example, going to a film like Twister, and watching a couple survive an F5 tornado by tying themselves with belts to a pipe is just too ridiculous. Stuff like that drives me crazy – I just can’t see why they can’t get it right. It would be so simple to do it correctly.”
According to Doran, Ellis has left the bulk of the detail up to her, knowing that her fascination with space and approach to art will yield the results he wants for the story. “Warren and I are both are space aficionados, and he knows whole hog to try and visualize what he’s thinking,” Doran said. “He’s said, ‘This is exactly what I wanted,’ when I’ve sent pages over. To me, being a cartoonist means world-building. We are creating a reality from nothing, and everything matters. People’s costumes matter, their body language matters. The sets matter a great deal – that creates the world, they create the reality for the reader, and it should be complete.
“I know a lot of artists don’t believe that – they like the art to be very, very simple, and leave the detail up to the mind of the reader, but what about leaving it in the mind of the writer and artist, and allow us to bring you into our world and let the reader visit what we’ve envisioned, a complete vision – something that is three dimensional and totally realized and will take you completely out of yourself.
“A lot of fiction is about the reader identifying with the work, which is almost a narcissistic act – they project themselves into the work. I’m primarily interested in work that does not give you a narcissistic thrill, that puts me outside of myself, and lets me experience things that are alien to my being. I enjoy that, and that’s what I want to give my readers. I don’t necessarily want to pick up things that remind me of me. What do I need a mirror for? I already know what I look like and think, I want to know what other people think and envision. I want to see something that’s alien to me – I want an experience outside of myself. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
With Doran’s approach world-building, the research she mentioned earlier was a necessity, not an option, and every relevant detail she found worked its way into the story. For example, unless you know where to look, you’re bound to miss some of the shuttle’s rockets – there are roughly 42 in all.
“A lot of them are in the nose itself and are used for maneuvering, because in space, every push one way has to have an opposite push the other way to stop the motion,” Doran explained. “A lot of the rockets are part of these tiny maneuvering systems that I didn’t know were even there – I knew there were depressions in the nose, but had no idea what they were. That was a big surprise to find out just how many rockets are on the ship. When you look at the back, you see these big bells, but those aren’t the only ones – if you look closely, there are two more on either side, and a couple more above them, and then, when you look at the nose, there are all these other rockets, both along the sides and the top. It looks really funky.”
Doran’s research has also resulted in her friends who work at NASA being able to name the make and model of the guns the military forces use, as well as the helicopters. “Those are all Hueys,” Doran said, “Which are, incidentally, the only vehicle assigned to the space command. It’s the only one they have – they have Hueys and that’s it.
“Also, overall, in drawing Kennedy Space Center, even ten years or so into the future, I was very happy, because many people who’ve looked at the pages have said immediately, ‘That’s Kennedy Space Center.’”
Although truth be told, despite Doran’s shot of the shuttle hangar with the American flag, there may be a detail or two off at Kennedy. “I drove myself a little crazy, because I’d never been to the Space Center, and I couldn’t find anybody who could tell me in which direction the building faced,” Doran admitted. “Did it face east? Did it face west? Which direction would the shuttle land in? I couldn’t find out that information, even though I have a zillion friends who work in NASA. Time was running out, and I had to get a move on. I hope I didn’t screw up too much. It’s kind of sad that my big worry is which direction the sun will rise from.
“I grew up five minutes from NASA: Langley – I spent my whole life going there, and many of my friends work for NASA, and the space program has always been a big interest of mine, but I’ve never been to the Florida or Texas facilities.”
Along with the research which results in technical details matching reality, Orbiter also allowed Doran to develop and utilize new techniques, one of which proved that the goddess serendipity does look out for all artists.
“Part of the storyline has the Venture coming back covered with a skin-like substance,” Doran explained at the Vertigo panel. “I was working on those pages, and had to go to New York, so I was inking on the train, and the motion worked just perfectly for the look I was after. So on any of those pages showing the skin, I had to ink them in a moving vehicle. My attempt to control the inking against the movement of the vehicle really gives it this interesting edge that I don’t do as well when I’m sitting still. It sounds wacky, but it really works.”
Also, the shot of the shuttle in the hangar provided an opportunity to play with a slightly different approach – instead of drawing the scaffolding around the shuttle, Doran drew where the scaffolding wasn’t. “On something like the scaffolding, normally, especially when I draw A Distant Soil, I draw each beam,” Doran said. “What I’ve done here instead was to draw shadow only – I drew the space between the beams, rather than the beams themselves.”
But don’t get her wrong – the level of detail, especially in an image like the shuttle in the hangar, or the tent city that grew up around it did require a lot – make that a lot of time to draw. “The trick is not to try and do it all at once,” Doran said. “I work on about a dozen pages at a time, and to keep myself from getting bored or getting vapor locked on a project, I’ll dance from page to page. A page like the shot inside the hangar, which was extremely complex and time-consuming – I would work on for an hour to three hours a day over the course of three weeks. That way, it didn’t become overwhelming. I was still overwhelming at the end, because I had about four hours to get it done before FedEx left, and I probably could’ve worked on it for another week. Looking at it now though, I’m not sure what I could’ve worked on it for another week, because I think it’s about done.”
Given that the Venture, as well as the Space Center itself is old and in a state of disrepair, Doran said she had to mix her technical detail with a degree of grubbiness, resulting in a lot of texture work. “I already have a funky technique for inking texture, which basically involves getting your pen really goopy with paper fiber – letting the paper fiber accumulate, and then letting the ink accumulate on the pen,” Doran said. “Another place where I used a lot of texture was with the shuttle itself. I was surprised that many people have forgotten that the shuttle is covered with tiles. I didn’t want to use clean lines, so there are many places where I didn’t use a ruler, just to give the impression of imperfection, I hand drew the ellipses and the lines. And to achieve the impression of the tiles, I used an etching technique, because if it’s too clean, it really doesn’t look like the tiles.
“In person, it’s hard to see the tiles from a distance, but there are thousands and thousands of them, and they’ve all got serial numbers on them, and they’re all slightly different. They’re all completely unique shapes, and I just didn’t want to draw it too clean.”
In contrast to the technical, more draftsman-like quality of the shuttle and machinery in Orbiter was Doran’s approach to the characters in the graphic novel. “For the people, I used a very heavy chiaroscuro technique – very clean lines. They’re solidly modeled with heavy blacks. On the shuttle and tech stuff, it’s highly detailed, with lots of rendering and an enormous amount of texture.
“When I first stared turning in pages to Heidi, she said it looked like it was drawn by two different people. I’m using two completely different techniques, and two completely different sets of tools to achieve them. So, on the technical drawing, I’m using technical pens only, and on the figure work, I’m using crowquill pens only. There’s no brush in the book at all. It gives you very different looks, but I think it also makes it very striking, because you go from these scenes with the people, and are just smacked in the face with this whole new environment. When you turn the page, I want you to be hit right between the eyes.”
And while the technical side of the project required heavy research, the character side didn’t. “I had no trouble coming up with character designs,” Doran said. “I did single drawings for each character, and Warren approved them immediately. I was really happy with the astronaut, who I sort of made to look like a John Glen type who was rode hard and put out wet. He was a lot of fun to draw, and came out very, very quickly. Actually, Warren did have a comment on his – I made him a little too young at first, and he asked me to put a few years on him. But all the other characters – boom – no problem.”
As you can probably tell from the variety of pages, Orbiter is well on its way to completion, and looks to be on track for an early 2003 release. According to Doran, Ellis has completed over 60 pages of the 96-page story, while she has over 50 pages of art in the drawer. “We are on the home stretch,” Doran said. “I’m absolutely positive that this will be out in a timely fashion. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be.”
As a side effect of her work on Orbiter Doran is quite amused to find herself the hot young thing at DC again. “Now I’m getting calls all the time,” Doran said. “It’s so funny – a lot of people in the business haven’t seen my work in years. I haven’t done very many comic book shows, and haven’t done any major shows in four years. Many editors, when they think of A Distant Soil, they think of work I did ten or fifteen years ago, and haven’t looked at it since, so they weren’t entirely certain of what I could do. Now, they’re looking at Orbiter and are telling me they didn’t think I could draw like this. Hey – thanks for giving me the opportunity.
“There was a little resistance to having me on the book, and I had to convince them that I was the right person for the job. The whole office breathed a collective sigh of relief when the pages started coming in. Heidi and I had a running joke – she would show the pages to people as they came in, and would ask who they thought they were by, and no one would be able to guess the artist. She would e-mail me the list of names, and we were cracking up – it was very flattering – some of them were very big names, but none of the artists were women, so none of them were me.
“It’s very funny, but one of the things I have trouble emphasizing to my clients its that I try and draw to the book, and I approach each project like an actor would approach a role. I immerse myself in the character of the book – I read books, I watch movies, I listen to music – I adopt postures, body language and clothes that reflect the character of the project I happen to be working on at the time, so I can emphasize what the book is about and what the book should look like.”
Doran’s response to the editors and others within the industry who are surprised at her “new” look is something between bemusement and annoyance. “When I draw A Distant Soil I draw the way I do, because I think that’s a style that’s appropriate for that book,” Doran said. “That’s not the way I’m going to draw every book. I didn’t draw Sonic the Hedgehog the way I draw A Distant Soil. I didn’t draw Clive Barker’s Hellraiser the way I draw A Distant Soil. I’m going to change my work completely to suit the book.
“It’s not necessarily the best professional move, because people can’t get a hold on you. It’s like being a good actor – if you change from role to role, people won’t recognize you, and you don’t really get popular - but at the same time, you don’t calcify, and you can continually hone your craft and try to get better and better. That’s what I try to do, and I suppose I succeed to varying degrees, but I have absolutely no interest in drawing the same style for the rest of my natural life. I will certainly take on other jobs that will enable me to work in this style again, because I really like it.
“What’s funny is that a lot of women will come up to me and say, ‘Ohhh, you were forced to change your style to make it suit the market and you had to make it look like a superhero.’ I wasn’t forced to do anything – I changed my style to suit the book, and I can do it, and I think it’s appropriate to do it. You wouldn’t expect a singer to sing every song the same way; you wouldn’t expect an actor to approach every role the same way. I have absolutely no idea why people would expect comic artists to draw the same way every time they pick up a pen. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. With this project, and the stuff I have coming up, the project dictates the style I use. It’s not the other way around.”
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Attendees of the “Evolving Vertigo” panel at last weekend’s WizardWorld Chicago convention got to see creator Colleen Doran in rare form. When asked to speak about her work on the upcoming Warren Ellis-written original graphic novel, Orbiter, Doran positively gushed, excitedly speaking about the research she’s done for the project, adopting a new style for the story, and how it was a dream for her thanks to her long-time fascination with NASA, and all things space-related. As she spoke and became more excited, Doran’s Southern accent began to seep through, leaving the audience with a description of the project peppered with “y’all’s.” Newsarama tracked the creator down to talk about just what she has up her sleeve for Orbiter, and what has her so excited.
First off, Orbiter will be one of Ellis’ first projects coming out from DC under his new exclusive contract with the publisher. Story-wise, the graphic novel is set ten years after the space shuttle Venture and its crew of seven disappeared from earth orbit. Already on shaky public relations ground, the disaster ended human space flight, forcing NASA to commit itself to robotic exploration only.
NASA abandons Kennedy Space Center for financial as well as practical reasons, and the once-time spaceport is taken over by the homeless castoffs of society, who’ve built a huge tent city on the grounds. All is quiet for ten years, and then the Venture returns, landing at Kennedy, with only one of it’s crew still alive, albeit insane.
The shuttle is augmented by instrumentation it didn’t have when it left a decade earlier, it’s covered with an organic skin, and has Martian dust on its undercarriage. Orbiter is the story of what happened to its crew, and where the Venture went.
Probably best known for her fantasy-esque creator-owned series A Distant Soil, the news of Doran teaming with Ellis on what sounded like a hard science fiction story raised a few eyebrows among both fans and editors alike. Ellis and Doran (and the project’s original editor Heidi MacDonald) persevered, and the artist threw herself into research.
“Something like A Distant Soil would require an awful lot of research over a protracted period of time,” Doran explained. “Orbiter required an enormous amount of research over a very short period of time – I spent probably about three weeks doing nothing but studying. I spent over $500 on models, reference books, and everything I would need to draw the shuttle accurately, understand how it works.
“I didn’t think it would be a good idea to make the same mistakes I’d seen so many other people make, such as showing the shuttle flying with the bottom towards the earth – the tiles always face towards the sun. If I’m showing it taking off, I need to be able to understand how it rolls, and different things like which rockets fire first, and which of the rocket boosters fall off first. They’re the kind of things that would drive me crazy if I would draw them incorrectly – I just needed to make sure that I got them right.”
And a quick look at a Googled image of the space shuttle wasn’t going to be enough. As Doran learned, there are subtle design changes with each new shuttle, so as a result, the original shuttle, Columbia bears only superficial resemblance to the newest, Atlantis. “The landing gear is different, the control ports have been changed, the NASA ‘worm’ used to be painted on the shuttle, now it’s the meatball,” Doran explained. “There are a hundred little things that I could really screw up if I wasn’t paying attention, so I immersed myself in the subject as much as I could.”
Okay – it’s a safe bet that there are more than a few readers thinking, “So?” at this point. Is it a lot of trouble for nothing? Obviously, Doran doesn’t think so, and that fact affects her approach to her entire craft and all her work.
“It’s just lazy ass not to get it right,” Doran said. “It’s important to me, because we’re telling a story and creating a world for the reader. Why should we do a sloppy job? I can’t stand sloppy work, and to me, poor research is sloppy work. When a reader picks this thing up, I want them to know that I’ve done the very best I could do. They’re getting their money’s worth.
“As a science fiction fan myself, when I go to a movie, and I see really lousy science, it ruins the experience for me, and I have a hard time seriously – not that you can take too many science fiction films seriously. For example, going to a film like Twister, and watching a couple survive an F5 tornado by tying themselves with belts to a pipe is just too ridiculous. Stuff like that drives me crazy – I just can’t see why they can’t get it right. It would be so simple to do it correctly.”
According to Doran, Ellis has left the bulk of the detail up to her, knowing that her fascination with space and approach to art will yield the results he wants for the story. “Warren and I are both are space aficionados, and he knows whole hog to try and visualize what he’s thinking,” Doran said. “He’s said, ‘This is exactly what I wanted,’ when I’ve sent pages over. To me, being a cartoonist means world-building. We are creating a reality from nothing, and everything matters. People’s costumes matter, their body language matters. The sets matter a great deal – that creates the world, they create the reality for the reader, and it should be complete.
“I know a lot of artists don’t believe that – they like the art to be very, very simple, and leave the detail up to the mind of the reader, but what about leaving it in the mind of the writer and artist, and allow us to bring you into our world and let the reader visit what we’ve envisioned, a complete vision – something that is three dimensional and totally realized and will take you completely out of yourself.
“A lot of fiction is about the reader identifying with the work, which is almost a narcissistic act – they project themselves into the work. I’m primarily interested in work that does not give you a narcissistic thrill, that puts me outside of myself, and lets me experience things that are alien to my being. I enjoy that, and that’s what I want to give my readers. I don’t necessarily want to pick up things that remind me of me. What do I need a mirror for? I already know what I look like and think, I want to know what other people think and envision. I want to see something that’s alien to me – I want an experience outside of myself. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
With Doran’s approach world-building, the research she mentioned earlier was a necessity, not an option, and every relevant detail she found worked its way into the story. For example, unless you know where to look, you’re bound to miss some of the shuttle’s rockets – there are roughly 42 in all.
“A lot of them are in the nose itself and are used for maneuvering, because in space, every push one way has to have an opposite push the other way to stop the motion,” Doran explained. “A lot of the rockets are part of these tiny maneuvering systems that I didn’t know were even there – I knew there were depressions in the nose, but had no idea what they were. That was a big surprise to find out just how many rockets are on the ship. When you look at the back, you see these big bells, but those aren’t the only ones – if you look closely, there are two more on either side, and a couple more above them, and then, when you look at the nose, there are all these other rockets, both along the sides and the top. It looks really funky.”
Doran’s research has also resulted in her friends who work at NASA being able to name the make and model of the guns the military forces use, as well as the helicopters. “Those are all Hueys,” Doran said, “Which are, incidentally, the only vehicle assigned to the space command. It’s the only one they have – they have Hueys and that’s it.
“Also, overall, in drawing Kennedy Space Center, even ten years or so into the future, I was very happy, because many people who’ve looked at the pages have said immediately, ‘That’s Kennedy Space Center.’”
Although truth be told, despite Doran’s shot of the shuttle hangar with the American flag, there may be a detail or two off at Kennedy. “I drove myself a little crazy, because I’d never been to the Space Center, and I couldn’t find anybody who could tell me in which direction the building faced,” Doran admitted. “Did it face east? Did it face west? Which direction would the shuttle land in? I couldn’t find out that information, even though I have a zillion friends who work in NASA. Time was running out, and I had to get a move on. I hope I didn’t screw up too much. It’s kind of sad that my big worry is which direction the sun will rise from.
“I grew up five minutes from NASA: Langley – I spent my whole life going there, and many of my friends work for NASA, and the space program has always been a big interest of mine, but I’ve never been to the Florida or Texas facilities.”
Along with the research which results in technical details matching reality, Orbiter also allowed Doran to develop and utilize new techniques, one of which proved that the goddess serendipity does look out for all artists.
“Part of the storyline has the Venture coming back covered with a skin-like substance,” Doran explained at the Vertigo panel. “I was working on those pages, and had to go to New York, so I was inking on the train, and the motion worked just perfectly for the look I was after. So on any of those pages showing the skin, I had to ink them in a moving vehicle. My attempt to control the inking against the movement of the vehicle really gives it this interesting edge that I don’t do as well when I’m sitting still. It sounds wacky, but it really works.”
Also, the shot of the shuttle in the hangar provided an opportunity to play with a slightly different approach – instead of drawing the scaffolding around the shuttle, Doran drew where the scaffolding wasn’t. “On something like the scaffolding, normally, especially when I draw A Distant Soil, I draw each beam,” Doran said. “What I’ve done here instead was to draw shadow only – I drew the space between the beams, rather than the beams themselves.”
But don’t get her wrong – the level of detail, especially in an image like the shuttle in the hangar, or the tent city that grew up around it did require a lot – make that a lot of time to draw. “The trick is not to try and do it all at once,” Doran said. “I work on about a dozen pages at a time, and to keep myself from getting bored or getting vapor locked on a project, I’ll dance from page to page. A page like the shot inside the hangar, which was extremely complex and time-consuming – I would work on for an hour to three hours a day over the course of three weeks. That way, it didn’t become overwhelming. I was still overwhelming at the end, because I had about four hours to get it done before FedEx left, and I probably could’ve worked on it for another week. Looking at it now though, I’m not sure what I could’ve worked on it for another week, because I think it’s about done.”
Given that the Venture, as well as the Space Center itself is old and in a state of disrepair, Doran said she had to mix her technical detail with a degree of grubbiness, resulting in a lot of texture work. “I already have a funky technique for inking texture, which basically involves getting your pen really goopy with paper fiber – letting the paper fiber accumulate, and then letting the ink accumulate on the pen,” Doran said. “Another place where I used a lot of texture was with the shuttle itself. I was surprised that many people have forgotten that the shuttle is covered with tiles. I didn’t want to use clean lines, so there are many places where I didn’t use a ruler, just to give the impression of imperfection, I hand drew the ellipses and the lines. And to achieve the impression of the tiles, I used an etching technique, because if it’s too clean, it really doesn’t look like the tiles.
“In person, it’s hard to see the tiles from a distance, but there are thousands and thousands of them, and they’ve all got serial numbers on them, and they’re all slightly different. They’re all completely unique shapes, and I just didn’t want to draw it too clean.”
In contrast to the technical, more draftsman-like quality of the shuttle and machinery in Orbiter was Doran’s approach to the characters in the graphic novel. “For the people, I used a very heavy chiaroscuro technique – very clean lines. They’re solidly modeled with heavy blacks. On the shuttle and tech stuff, it’s highly detailed, with lots of rendering and an enormous amount of texture.
“When I first stared turning in pages to Heidi, she said it looked like it was drawn by two different people. I’m using two completely different techniques, and two completely different sets of tools to achieve them. So, on the technical drawing, I’m using technical pens only, and on the figure work, I’m using crowquill pens only. There’s no brush in the book at all. It gives you very different looks, but I think it also makes it very striking, because you go from these scenes with the people, and are just smacked in the face with this whole new environment. When you turn the page, I want you to be hit right between the eyes.”
And while the technical side of the project required heavy research, the character side didn’t. “I had no trouble coming up with character designs,” Doran said. “I did single drawings for each character, and Warren approved them immediately. I was really happy with the astronaut, who I sort of made to look like a John Glen type who was rode hard and put out wet. He was a lot of fun to draw, and came out very, very quickly. Actually, Warren did have a comment on his – I made him a little too young at first, and he asked me to put a few years on him. But all the other characters – boom – no problem.”
As you can probably tell from the variety of pages, Orbiter is well on its way to completion, and looks to be on track for an early 2003 release. According to Doran, Ellis has completed over 60 pages of the 96-page story, while she has over 50 pages of art in the drawer. “We are on the home stretch,” Doran said. “I’m absolutely positive that this will be out in a timely fashion. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be.”
As a side effect of her work on Orbiter Doran is quite amused to find herself the hot young thing at DC again. “Now I’m getting calls all the time,” Doran said. “It’s so funny – a lot of people in the business haven’t seen my work in years. I haven’t done very many comic book shows, and haven’t done any major shows in four years. Many editors, when they think of A Distant Soil, they think of work I did ten or fifteen years ago, and haven’t looked at it since, so they weren’t entirely certain of what I could do. Now, they’re looking at Orbiter and are telling me they didn’t think I could draw like this. Hey – thanks for giving me the opportunity.
“There was a little resistance to having me on the book, and I had to convince them that I was the right person for the job. The whole office breathed a collective sigh of relief when the pages started coming in. Heidi and I had a running joke – she would show the pages to people as they came in, and would ask who they thought they were by, and no one would be able to guess the artist. She would e-mail me the list of names, and we were cracking up – it was very flattering – some of them were very big names, but none of the artists were women, so none of them were me.
“It’s very funny, but one of the things I have trouble emphasizing to my clients its that I try and draw to the book, and I approach each project like an actor would approach a role. I immerse myself in the character of the book – I read books, I watch movies, I listen to music – I adopt postures, body language and clothes that reflect the character of the project I happen to be working on at the time, so I can emphasize what the book is about and what the book should look like.”
Doran’s response to the editors and others within the industry who are surprised at her “new” look is something between bemusement and annoyance. “When I draw A Distant Soil I draw the way I do, because I think that’s a style that’s appropriate for that book,” Doran said. “That’s not the way I’m going to draw every book. I didn’t draw Sonic the Hedgehog the way I draw A Distant Soil. I didn’t draw Clive Barker’s Hellraiser the way I draw A Distant Soil. I’m going to change my work completely to suit the book.
“It’s not necessarily the best professional move, because people can’t get a hold on you. It’s like being a good actor – if you change from role to role, people won’t recognize you, and you don’t really get popular - but at the same time, you don’t calcify, and you can continually hone your craft and try to get better and better. That’s what I try to do, and I suppose I succeed to varying degrees, but I have absolutely no interest in drawing the same style for the rest of my natural life. I will certainly take on other jobs that will enable me to work in this style again, because I really like it.
“What’s funny is that a lot of women will come up to me and say, ‘Ohhh, you were forced to change your style to make it suit the market and you had to make it look like a superhero.’ I wasn’t forced to do anything – I changed my style to suit the book, and I can do it, and I think it’s appropriate to do it. You wouldn’t expect a singer to sing every song the same way; you wouldn’t expect an actor to approach every role the same way. I have absolutely no idea why people would expect comic artists to draw the same way every time they pick up a pen. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. With this project, and the stuff I have coming up, the project dictates the style I use. It’s not the other way around.”
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