MODERN MASTERS: CHARLES VESS

[MattBrady]

From MODERN MASTERS VOL. 11: CHARLES VESS, on sale February 28, from TwoMorrows Publishing:

Enchanting. That is the best word to describe the artwork of Charles Vess. Whether it be his book illustrations, his paintings, or his comic book stories, Vess' work evokes worlds of magic and wonder. The winner of two World Fantasy Awards - one with Neil Gaiman for Best Short Story for their collaborative effort, Sandman #19; the second for Best Artist for his illustrations for Stardust, also written by Gaiman, and soon to be a major motion picture - and two Eisner Awards, Charles Vess has proven himself to be one of the greatest fantasy artists of our time.

The following is an excerpt from Modern Masters Vol. 11: Charles Vess, edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Chris Irving. The interview was conducted by Chris Irving.

Modern Masters: So you were basically self-publishing Ballads around the height of the crash of the early '90s.

CHARLES: I started right before it, and I was selling 25,000 copies per issue of my book. I still remember being at some convention and I was talking to Shooter, who was publishing his third line of comics [Broadway Comics]. I could see in his mind that he was trying to figure out how I was doing what I was doing, and I still remembered him as the dictator of Marvel. But there I was selling more copies than he was, and my comic was in black-&-white.

MM: So you just decided to self-publish?

CHARLES: Well, I was hanging out with Jeff Smith, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch. I came up with the idea of doing a comic based on Scottish and English ballads, and I thought, "It's got a really weird, broad based appeal to consumers, as I use well known authors from the mystery, science fiction, and fantasy fields to write most of my scripts; folk music aficionados are interested in the ballads themselves; and the comic book fans will hopefully buy it because of my work." And I was right. I even got a lot of folk music enthusiasts who subscribed that had never bought or looked at a comic book in their life.

MM: So were you packing and shipping these yourself?

CHARLES: Yes, I was! [laughs]

MM: Oh, my gosh.

CHARLES: Oh, the joy. The thrill of it all.

MM: Yeah, even the wonders of bulk mailing?

CHARLES: Bulk mailing, subscriptions, answering e-mails, guerrilla marketing, all those things, which I really enjoyed for a long time, but there was a certain point where I realized that I was spending an entire week doing all those things and feeling like I'd accomplished quite a lot but I hadn't gone near my drawing board. I'm an artist, it's what I'm supposed to be doing. I had an assistant and I still only got the four issues out. At that time, too, my wife was in very bad shape from her accident. We had no insurance and quickly racked up some very high hospital bills. Although I'd always made money on each issue, it was never steady and nowhere near what we needed to start paying some of those medical bills. The comics industry came through in a very big and amazing way which helped put a serious dent in some of those bills, but I still needed a more substantial freelance income than what my self-publishing efforts brought me.

MM: What were your basic guidelines for the writers?

CHARLES: I asked that all the scripts be no longer than eight to ten pages using the actual narrative from a particular ballad as its basic plot. The writers could then do anything they wanted with subplots. They could set the tale in a different time period if they wanted. None of the contributors were paid until each book was printed and distributed. Later they also received a percentage of the royalties. Some of them managed to make more money from the process than if they'd been paid a flat fee for an 8- to 10-page pure text story.

MM: Were they mostly well known authors?

CHARLES: Most of them were familiar. Some of them were not. The funniest and most involved script was from Lee Smith, a wonderful writer. She's also been on the New York Times bestseller list, but she's sort of local, and a really nice person. I really liked her writing. After much begging on my part, she turned in the script. After reading it I was stunned, because I felt it featured some of the worst Victorian-style dialogue I'd ever read in my life. And I thought, "Oh, my God, I can't draw this!" I put it in a drawer, and it sat there for about six or seven years. It finally occurred to me that every time I mentioned the script to a friend, I was describing it as a melodrama, as if you were watching it being performed on a stage with a villainous man in black twirling his waxed mustache while spouting wildly melodramatic dialogue. And one day it struck me that the dialogue was perfect once it was actually coming from an old fashioned stage. So that's the way I eventually drew it, as a play.

MM: Oh, yes, "The Three Lovers."

CHARLES: It's a doom-&-destruction story. Everybody dies in it. I added the clown character that introduces the story, but every other thing is just like it was in the script. I did do one long shot from the interior of the cottage looking out at the audience, and after I'd inked it and was ready to send the story to the printer, I thought, "Oh, my gosh! I did that wrong!" I was understandably a little nervous about showing my extreme interpretation of her story to Lee, since I had changed the entire context of the story. I sent it to her and got a note back saying, "To be honest"-it had been seven years, remember-"I don't remember writing this."

At the time she was still grieving over a personal family tragedy, and she appreciated the laugh. So, it came out and it got the best reviews. The new collected edition, The Book of Ballads, was published by Tor Books, who have done an amazing job of getting the book out into the real world of bookstores and libraries. It's garnered some lovely reviews from The Washington Post, The New York Times, on and on and on. Splendid!

MM: I like how you've adapted your style for each story. That story reminds me of Winsor McKay.

CHARLES: From the very first story I always realized that I'd want to publish all of the stories in a single collection. I felt that there needed to be some variation in art style to retain a reader's visual interest. If it was all the same intensely crosshatched stuff....

MM: It would get old. You have a real Al Capp feel on "The Galtee Farmer," which you did with Jeff Smith.

CHARLES: When Jeff writes, he writes scripts with scribbles in it, so he basically hands you his layout along with the script. It was exhilarating diving into the comical simplicity of "The Galtee Farmer" after so very many gothic stories.

MM: How did you land getting foreign editions of Ballads and Sagas out?

CHARLES: They just contacted me. The thing that's interesting about the foreign edition is that they have a problem with translating the poetry of the ballad itself into whichever language is needed. The French translators came to me and asked, "Excuse me, please, but what is a 'woman's maidenhead'? Perhaps a woman's head cut off?" I started trying to explain that particular term, and every time I would type something, I would be using some sort of slang, which, of course, wouldn't translate either. I had to try to offer a scientific translation. And of course it's a woman's private womb that usually denotes when she's been raped. It was an interesting language problem.

MM: Looking back at Ballads and Sagas, do you plan on going back to it sometime soon?

CHARLES: It's very alluring subject matter for me, but I have a lot of projects that I might at some point want to do. There are still some particular ballads that I'd like to adapt, but they'll just have to keep their place in line and be patient.

MM: So what type of reactions did you get when you told people you'd be adapting ballads?

CHARLES: Within the comics field there was a general shaking of heads in disbelief at my chosen subject matter. Also, I can remember when I had my first issue in hand, I went to one of the local colleges that has an actual ballad studies department and attempted to show what I'd done to its department head. All he had to say was, "You can't draw music!" Of course not, but you can draw the story that inspires the music. The ballads themselves are seminal stories for writers of fantasy literature and have been used as the basis of many a contemporary fiction. Every element of a great story is there, and they lend themselves very well to all sorts of interpretations. There's something very appealing to me about that music that carries those stories, too.

MM: How long have you been listening to ballads?

CHARLES: Since about 1970. I won an art contest in Richmond, Virginia. I think I got a $15 gift certificate at the local record shop, and back then you could buy three records for that. I got two Moody Blues albums-a favorite band at the time-and I decided I'd blow the rest of the money on something I didn't know anything at all about. I looked through the whole store, and there was one album that had this beautiful cover by Albrecht DÄrer. Is he Swiss or German? [Note: DÄrer (1471-1528) was German] Whatever. That guy. I looked on the back and saw the titles of the songs, which all looked interesting, so I bought it. It was a group called Pentangle, a British folk/rock/jazz group, and they were using ballads as their jumping off place. I fell in love with their music, and ballads in general, from that moment on.

MM: So you did Ballads and Sagas, tried different styles for different stories... and then Stardust came out. Somewhere in all of that is The Trilogy Tour.

CHARLES: The Trilogy Tour.... At the end of San Diego one year I was standing there talking to Linda Medley [who was self-publishing Castle Waiting], and we both had our little booths, and I said "Maybe we need to get together and have bigger booth so we'll make more of an impression." And just about then, Jeff Smith went by and I said, "Jeff! Come over here." And he was like, "Yeah, yeah, what?"

So right there we started coming up with this grandiose scheme that was way more than just a simple booth display. We eventually developed a physical 3-D environment to exhibit in. We didn't want our space to be rectangular like most booths, but to reflect all of our preoccupation with nature and the environment. In the end we were sitting amidst giant styrofoam standing stones and all sorts of other decoration, all gathered around a large tree made with aluminum framing and covered with textured material and silk ivy. You could actually climb up the tree to the top and see the con from an entirely new perspective. You could also hide in it and listen to people's conversations about your work; that was fun.

We did three stops, three conventions, and three in-store appearances over the first summer-Dragon Con, Chicago Con, San Diego Comic-Con-and at each one of the stops we had a retailer party, because one of our theories was that most creative people never talk to the retailers and vice versa. But with self-publishing, you learn how important it is to develop a relationship with the retailers that sell your books. So we invited people like Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Art Adams, etc., to the party, and it was just like a high school prom where all the boys are on one side, all the girls the other, except that here, it was all the creators would be over on the left and all the retailers over on the right. It became our job to be the mixers and hosts. We gave out a jam drawing done by all the artists present that was 30" x 40" as a prize drawing to one of the retailers, and how they got it home would be their problem. [laughter]

It was successful enough to where we were going to do it again the next year, but we thought having a few more people to split the costs would be smart. So the next year we added Stan Sakai, Mark Crilley, and Jill Thompson with a bit more stuff, and had a slightly bigger booth. It was very splashy. Right in the middle of that was when my wife had her accident. The accident happened while I was attending the Chicago Comic Con.

MM: What year was that?

CHARLES: '98. Then about two weeks later it was San Diego, which for me was an incredibly emotional experience. The powers that be at Comic-Con gave all the proceeds from their art auction to me, and it seemed like every artist at the con donated art. When they presented me with the proceeds it was a huge pile of bills and checks. If someone'd stopped me on the plane going back, they would have thought I was a drug dealer, because I had so much cash, but I must say it really helped pay a lot of the bills.

MM: She was in a car accident.

CHARLES: A car accident... spinal cord injury, and we didn't have health insurance. The bills to just the neurosurgeons were phenomenal. If artists were paid half that much for an hour and a half's work....

MM: I can't even begin to imagine what it was like.

CHARLES: Yeah, it was tough having to deal with everything myself, learning about insurance, learning about Medicare, etc.

MM: Yeah, yeah, I bet. So how did that work, did you just stop work altogether to take care of her?

CHARLES: DC was especially great. They called me up and gave me a whole bunch of covers to do. They certainly weren't the best covers I've ever done in my life, some Books of Magic, but they were loading my work pallet so I could keep paying those bills.

And also, Neil and I came up with of doing The Fall of Stardust as a benefit portfolio, which was originally going to be a bound book. It had a story by Neil, one additional story by another writer, and 30 artists doing their interpretations of various scenes from our book, Stardust. Everything was falling into place when I got this very apologetic call from Karen Berger who said, "We would love to see you do this book, but there'd be a copyright issue if it's printed as you originally intended. Paul [Levitz] and I had an idea, though. If you resolicit it as a looseleaf portfolio-a non-bound book-then we'd have no legal problem with that." So that's what we did.

MM: I think it actually makes it more unique this way.

CHARLES: Yeah. So it was an interesting design. It did pretty well, especially for Susanna Clark. At that time, she was pretty unknown, but eventually she had a successful book called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This book came out and it was an international bestseller. So the story that she had written in The Fall of Stardust all of a sudden was becoming a hot item, and it's now selling like crazy on eBay. People that have the portfolio can sell it for two to three hundred dollars.

MM: Wow.

CHARLES: Especially if she's signed it. It's sort of a collectible. When it's on eBay now, it doesn't even mention that Neil wrote a story in it. [laughter] It's sort of humorous.

MM: [jokingly] "Neil, you're old news, hate to break it to ya, buddy!"

When did Stardust first start to gel for you?

CHARLES: Well, it began life during the 1991 World Fantasy Convention, which was out in Arizona. We had just won the World Fantasy Award for Sandman #19. I was at a party and Neil came to get me. We walked out into the desert and gazed up at the stars, both of us had glasses of champagne in hand, and Neil began to tell me the story of Stardust. I said, "Yeah, I'll draw that." It took two or three years for us to get our act together, and then his literary agent took the book to auction. Eventually DC offered the best deal. So I guess it was close to '96, '97.

It was done in four separate issues, and because of Neil's schedule, it was written as we did it. It was never given to me in complete manuscript form, so I didn't really know how it was going to end until I actually got the end of the story.

MM: I heard Neil changed his method of writing for this one?

CHARLES: Well, he was charged by the idea of writing mountains of text in longhand because he'd never done this before. He had grown up on computers and word processors, but this was our grand Romantic novel, so he'd write it the grand Romantic way [in longhand with a fountain pen]. The next time we were going to see each other was at the next San Diego con, and he sent me a Xerox of the first couple of chapters he'd written. The plan was that I'd read his manuscript on the plane flight to the convention. So I got on the plane, and began to read. His handwriting is eccentric to say the least; about every third word I'd circle because I couldn't read it. I gave up after five or six pages thinking, "I don't even know what any of this means, because I can't decipher enough of the words."

MM: He could have been a doctor?

CHARLES: Yeah, he could have been a doctor. So plan B became Neil sending me a cassette tape of him reading the first two chapters, also stumbling across words and going, "I don't know what that is, let's just skip that." And that was what I began to work from. Eventually his wife, Mary, volunteered to transcribe his handwriting for him. But the greatest pleasure was Neil ringing me up and reading the latest chapter that he'd just finished, just to see if I would laugh at the right times.

This method caused an interesting design problem in that I couldn't thumbnail the entire book at once. We were told that each of the four serialized book would be 48 pages and thus the final collection would be close to 200 pages in length. It was very difficult to achieve a pleasing balance of text and images without knowing what Neil was going to be writing next. This was almost pre-computers, and you couldn't just flow out some text to fill in the spaces between images. There was a lot of semi-educated guesswork used so that sometimes after the artwork would be done, it would then have to be shrunk down a whole lot to accommodate the text. Or sometimes the text had to be edited to give the art a bit of breathing room. There was a some give and take on both our parts, depending on how close to a text or an art deadline either of us were.

Every once in a while I might forget something pertinent and have to alter my finished painting, or not. The most significant of these edits was in the last part of the story, when Tristan wakes up, there's a badger there. In the text he's supposed to be wearing a heliotrope robe, and I just clean forgot about it and just drew a plain badger. Neil went "Oh, that's no problem," and edited his text. So, again, there were certain scenes that I couldn't draw and some scenes that I conceptualized differently, especially the village of Wall. Neil described it as an ancient village with one building after another, all leaning against each other in an effort to defy both age and gravity, but all of my drawings of Wall were going pretty much straight up and down. I don't know why, it didn't sink from my hand and through my fingers out on the page. So for the new edition I've been able to go back and draw certain images to more directly reflect Neil's text. These new images couldn't be inserted into the actual book, but will be in the supplemental material.

MM: That's why I just realized it was literally just a huge wall.

CHARLES: There's a photograph of the village that Neil clipped out of a magazine. He said, "This is what it should look like."

MM: I want to ask more about the process, but one thing I really picked up on that I see more in Stardust is that you create a depth of field by your foreground objects. You go over the foreground object-is that in ink?

CHARLES: Ink.

MM: You give it an ink line, but then you're creating this atmosphere of difference by just painting... or even just painting without a drawn outline.

CHARLES: Painting, or you outline the further away objects in a lighter color. It's sort of an animation effect.

MM: Yeah, very much so. When did you start doing that? Was it something you just did one day?

CHARLES: After you've done a billion paintings, you start to learn when to leave out which lines. A lot of the covers I've done-I did a year's worth of Swamp Thing covers and then a year's worth of Books of Magic covers before I started on Stardust, and it was pretty much learning where to leave out lines and where to just paint.

MM: In a lot of those, like you mentioned, you had a lot going on in your personal life, so I imagine you couldn't really worry about fine detail.

CHARLES: Yeah, and I experimented a lot at that time.

MM: There's a lot of "less is more," especially with this.

CHARLES: Yeah. And earlier on, three or four years earlier, this picture, the Golden Galleon picture [Stardust, pg. 161], probably would have had an outline around the clouds. And that would look really dumb.

MM: I also noticed some of the illustrations look like crayon on colored paper?

CHARLES: Yes. Some of it is done on colored paper.

MM: Is that-?

CHARLES: For variation. One of my biggest problems with graphic novels, say, for instance, Kingdom Come - I can't read it. There is no variation.... It's beautifully done, but there's the same intensity of detail on page one as at the end, y'know, and there's no visual rhythm to the story. I always want a bit of white space on the page so that my eye will relax. A lot of people like it the other way-full-bleed art from corner to corner-but I don't. It's the same thing with a movie. You can always have too much of the same thing.

MM: Right. You can have too many of the same shots repeated. It's like when I saw some zombie movie based on a video game, I can't even remember the name....

CHARLES: Oh, yeah, one of those.

MM: Yeah, Resident Evil, I think, or....

CHARLES: How many times can you kill him?

MM: Well, that, yes, but, it's like, how many times can you go, "Boo!" Y'know? And literally every two minutes that happens; you become numb to it, so the effect is gone and rather pointless. All you have left is this annoying loudness.

CHARLES: Yup. It's the problem I had with early Frank Miller Daredevil is that every page was oomphed up to the eighth power, and after a while that's just as boring as six panels of white, because it's exactly the same thing page after page after page.

MM: When Stardust came out as four separate issues, was it just the Sandman bandwagon jumping on it, or was it something that you found lots of people who'd never read Sandman were picking it up?

CHARLES: There was a lot of that. DC did try to do some advertising outside of comics, and they did a bunch of music magazines. They were just at the tip of the iceberg of realizing what they had happening with Neil's audience, and they hadn't quite learned how to take as much advantage of it as they can now. So it's going to be really interesting to see how the film goes. Now the problem is we've got this book that's usually described as a graphic novel, and of course it's not a graphic novel, it's an illustrated book.

MM: It's a novel with graphics in it, but it's not a graphic novel.

CHARLES: Right, but there's also a prose version of it, and that's out there, too. There's a confusion with the identity of the property. With this movie, we've got a contractual guarantee of a full-screen credit of "Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's Stardust." And the website's supposed to have a button that takes you to the book.

MM: Nice.

CHARLES: Yay! Woo! [laughter]

MM: I noticed that Tori Amos is the tree, right? The red tree with copper leaves?

CHARLES: Yes.

MM: How'd that happen? Did Neil just say to model the tree after her? I know that they have a friendship.

CHARLES: Yes, they have a longstanding friendship, but before the book happened, I had to produce about four or five paintings that were done before the text was written, to be used as promotional pieces to help sell the project. One of those pieces was based on a dream I'd had. I usually don't remember my dreams, but in this one Neil and I were walking through a deep, deep woods, and he was telling me the story of Stardust. I kept feeling like someone else was watching us or listening in. When I looked up, above us in the trees was the Greek god, Pan, smiling back down in approval. I woke up and thought, "Good heavens, what a great image!" So I did a painting using that concept, but peopling it with Stardust characters. For some reason, and I don't remember why I did it now, in that painting there's a red tree-a sort of explosion of color.

MM: Did Neil base it on Tori, or did she see it first?

CHARLES: Apparently, when Tori saw that image she asked Neil if she could be a tree in the story.

MM: Any chance she'll be voicing the tree in the movie?

CHARLES: Well, in the best of all possible worlds, yes. I don't even know whether that scene will be in the finished movie or not.

MM: When did you first hear about the movie?

CHARLES: Well, it's been optioned before. But sometime in the spring, Neil was starting talking about the possibility, saying, "I think this might happen." Then I began to hear that Matthew Vaughn, a friend of Neil's who's a producer/director of a number of films, was attached, and it just started happening. Matthew raised half of the budget in England, and that's being matched by Paramount Studios who will be releasing the film. The script reads very smoothly. I think that it's the strength of that script that got all these A-list actors on board. It will be a very different fantasy world than the norm, and if it works right, will have a really nice balance between romance and fantasy and horror. Michelle Pfieffer makes a really terrifying witch. You feel that she could indeed rip your heart right out. What I've seen so far looks really promising.

I visited the sets, and they were all really impressive. Matthew Vaughn doesn't really like CGI very much, and once they did some research they realized it's actually cheaper to build the sets than to develop CGI models.

MM: Are these set designs based off your work?

CHARLES: Oh, they started with my art and then went off in their own direction. They're extensions of concepts that Neil and I came up with.

MM: I can't get over the casting on this movie.

CHARLES: Robert DeNiro, Peter O'Toole, Rupert Everett, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes... Charlie Cox, who is actually the star of the movie, is a talented young actor. Apparently he was the only one who auditioned who could do both the nerd part of Tristan and the hero part of Tristan.

Time-wise, it's going to come out the weekend of San Diego. That's both really cool, and a real headache in scheduling my life. There's nothing I can do about it, though; I just have to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

They also just started doing test screenings, and they're getting really good feedback from those, and a lot of commentary on what might and might not work. Neil has seen the same rough cut, which still has unfinished special effects and music from other movies-which I'm told is a bit distracting-but he really liked what he saw.

MM: So, it's your first real movie experience, other than Hook. [laughter]

CHARLES: We won't go there!

MM: What tie-ins are coming out with this?

CHARLES: DC's doing an Absolute Stardust edition. I just did a full sculpture scene of Stardust and a fairy piper and several animals around a pool of water. DC is also producing four busts of Yvaine, Tristan, Primus-one of the major lords of Stormhold-and one of the Lillum; they all look really cool. They're doing a boxed set of notecards, two posters, and a new edition of the book, of course.

The Paramount website is going to do a whole section on the book. It took them months and months to realize the secret fan weapons they have with us; the value of Neil's message board is enormous. It was during the San Diego Comic-Con that six or seven thousand people showed up for the Stardust panel that they started to get what we had to offer. Also, Neil linked to them through his website and they got 100,000 hits. They're really trying to make the connection between the original book and the movie. I don't know what else Paramount is doing. I'm sure it'll be absolutely bizarre and I know I'd just start laughing if I walked into a Burger King and there are the characters!

MM: A Tristan figure with kung-fu grip!

CHARLES: I'll have to buy a Whopper, Jr.!

MM: What are some of the challenges you saw in sculpting Yvaine?

CHARLES: I started dabbling with sculpture several years ago, and the thing that really surprised me is that for me it's easier to sculpt than it is to draw figures. I don't know why that is, but I'm very happy about it. The thing with this one is that it's so small and there are so many details to it. There's some very tedious things you have to deal with. I got a lot of advice from Georg Brewer at DC on how to deal with some technical aspects.

For the rest of the Charles Vess interview, be sure to get Modern Masters Vol. 11: Charles (120-page trade paperback with color) when it goes on sale Feb. 28! It features a career-spanning interview and tons of artwork, including a large gallery section with many rare and unpublished pieces. Edited by Eric Nolen-Weathington and Christopher Irving.

Order at your local comics shop, or online at:



Single copies: $19 US Postpaid

[Ben543250]

Charles Vess is amazing. We're all lucky to be alive at the same time as him.

[render man]

Yeah really looking forward to the movie adaptation. Even if its not exact as the book, I think it still could be good, we will see.
I have to mention his book with Jeff Smith, ROSE is one of the most beautiful comics ever!

[AbacusComics]

Vess is definitely a modern master. And I love Stardust!

[Redmond]

Modern Masters is alright though it slightly annoys me seeing someone deemed a modern master of comics when they pick up people who've done like 5 or 6 comics total in their 30 years career and created no character that lasted. Was Ballads even finished? Yes, call me superficial but the title is inapropriate.

[Jeremy Bear]

Fantastic.

Kudos to TwoMorrows for this series. I just picked up the Kevin Maguire book today and it's a wonderful presentation. All of these books appear to be extremely comprehensive and dense. The price tag made me skeptical, but I'm glad to report it's worth the cash.

Looking forward to the Vess volume. Great artist, great subject for this treatment.

[Jeremy Bear]

Originally Posted by Redmond

Modern Masters is alright though it slightly annoys me seeing someone deemed a modern master of comics when they pick up people who've done like 5 or 6 comics total in their 30 years career and created no character that lasted. Was Ballads even finished? Yes, call me superficial but the title is inapropriate.

Hope you're not talking about Vess, the man's done substantially more than 5 or 6 comics.

And I'd disagree that creating lasting characters is what defines a "Modern Master". For my money, I'd much rather read an exhaustive interview with Charles Vess than Stan Lee. I'd submit that it takes more talent to tell a great story than to create a great character. Splitting hairs maybe, but that's as it appears to me.

As for Vess' contribution to the art of comic storytelling, he's a prime candidate. A beautiful, lush illustrator with a subtle, strange, powerful line who works in a variety of media. And for pete's sake, the guy's got a World Fantasy Award on his shelf. How many comics pros can put that on their resume?

[nweathington]

Thank you for the kind words, Jeremy. I'm glad you're enjoying the series.

Redmond, of course you are entitled to your opinion. But I would argue that it takes much more than creating a lasting character to make a great artist. I myself am much more interested in the artist's storytelling ability and if they have a unique point of view. And that's what I try to bring across in each of the books.

[beta-ray]

Vess does beautiful work. Thanks for the article.

[clirving]

I have to be honest about something: When I first signed up for this one with Eric, I was mostly familiar with Charles Vess as the Sandman artist...But re-reading everything from Warriors Three to Sandman to Stardust to Ballads reminded me of just how versatile Charles Vess is. While many artists are great at one specific genre, Vess covers the gamut from fantasy to superhero and he does it all...really...well. He also has the ability to tell the same story in either a single illustration...or a three panel sequence.
Anyways, it was a blast (and an education) doing this interview with Charles, and I'm really glad to hear so much positive response to his work.
And, by the way, I don't know what Eric was on when he designed this one, but he really knocked himself out on it.

[Royal Nonesuch]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Bear

And for pete's sake, the guy's got a World Fantasy Award on his shelf. How many comics pros can put that on their resume?

Let's not forget that it's because of the outcry at a comic book story winning the award that the World Fantasy folks re-wrote the rules of nomination in such a manner that no comic book can ever win the award again.

Granted, nobody in comics ever won it before Gaiman and Vess, but you know what I mean.

[AllAboutMe]

Charles Vess can do some really nice work, but I think this is the first Modern Masters book I will be passing on (or, at least not ordering it before looking through it).
Cannot wait for the upcoming Michael Golden and Jerry Ordway and whatever may come after!

[Supreme Convoy]

I cannot wait for Stardust! I'll have to pick up this book.

[Tony T]

Originally Posted by Redmond

Modern Masters is alright though it slightly annoys me seeing someone deemed a modern master of comics when they pick up people who've done like 5 or 6 comics total in their 30 years career and created no character that lasted. Was Ballads even finished?

A search of the Grand Comic Database reveals that Charles Vess is listed as the penciller on 265 individual comic books, and that's not even a complete list. As for Ballads, was it ever intended to go beyond the four issues that were completed and collected in 1997?

In my opinion, the quality and consistency of the man's artwork is far above almost everything else that's being published in comics today, and the title of Modern Master is not only fitting but inevitable. I get the same mesmerizing sense of wonder from his artwork that I get from P. Craig Russell's or Michael Kaluta's. Charles Vess deserves every accolade that comes his way.

[innocentboy]

cool.
don't know much about Charles Vess, but his name is solid in my head from a bunch of Star Wars things he's done that were beautiful still.
pretty pictures.

[Skinshark]

Originally Posted by Redmond

Modern Masters is alright though it slightly annoys me seeing someone deemed a modern master of comics when they pick up people who've done like 5 or 6 comics total in their 30 years career and created no character that lasted. Was Ballads even finished? Yes, call me superficial but the title is inapropriate.

Not here to tell you your opinions wrong, but I think Modern Masters goes beyond contribution to a given field or medium. His work defies category in many respects, and his level of storytelling and draftsmanship give most a run for their money.

He's a man who cares and explores his craft. We should be so lucky to have a few of these types in our lifetime.

Though, I would agree on some level that I think Michael Kaluta should put his pen and watercolors down long enough to fill up one of these volumes. Now there's someone who spans galaxies and kingdoms!

=s=