IN DEPTH WITH ROSS CAMPBELL

[MattBrady]

by Chris Arrant

Last time Newsarama talked to Ross Campbell, he discussed the then-upcoming release of his zombie graphic graphic novel The Abandoned. Described then by the cartoonist as a "zombie story that's not about killing zombies", it features the type of lushly characterized (and drawn) individuals that Campbell has become known for, as their lives go head on against a zombie plague.

With the recent release of the second volume of his series Wet Moon at Oni Press and an upcoming high-profile gig that he can't talk about, we caught up with Campbell to talk about his past, his present and his future.

Newsarama: Your zombie comic The Abandoned came out from TOKYOPOP earlier in the year. How long have you had it in for zombies, and how do you think you did on your first outing?

Ross Campbell: I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was like eight years old or something, then I didn't see Dawn of the Dead until several years later, but I think Night of the Living Dead planted the zombie seed that fateful viewing long ago. So then after I saw Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead I was a devotee of George Romero. I love other zombie stuff, too, like Evil Dead, Dellamorte Dellamore, Zombie/Zombi 2, etc... but the Romero stuff is by far my favorite. I'd wanted to do a zombie comic but never had gotten around to it, I was always busy with Oni stuff and working a part-time job, but then when TOKYOPOP came along I saw the opportunity.

After it's done now, I'm not sure TOKYOPOP was the best publisher choice for that material, but I was glad I got to do it and I think I did pretty well. Part of me wishes I'd done a plotline that was more original, like something less of an "origin story" and rather a story that takes place in a world where the zombies are already established. But at the same time I think it was great to see the characters interacting and stuff without the zombies, and getting a sense of them when they're not cracking skulls or running away from the undead or getting eaten, not many zombie stories have that. The zombies and gore always ensue really quickly, so I tried to do something a little different and ended up having the first zombie appear almost 50 pages into the book. I wish I did a few other things differently, like maybe having less film dialogue references and more gore, or like more creative gore, as in people being eviscerated in more specific and unusual ways.

NRAMA: I read the book when it first came out; then I re-read it for this piece, and noticed that in the gruesome deaths there's a lot of eyes being poked, prodded and generally destroyed. Is this something you had planned out, or just the way it turned out?

RC: Speaking of gore, yeah, I knew I wanted the book to be totally brutal and not shy away from the blood and not have much (or any) off-camera stuff. If a character gets her eye stabbed out, dammit you're gonna see it. If I do a second zombie story, I hope to up the gore ante and have more eyeball-gougings and gut-munchings.

NRAMA: Gut-munchings. That's a great word.

Anyway, the first book leaves us on a cliffhanger. Any plans to do more volumes of The Abandoned?

RC: I may not be doing a volume 2, I'm not sure yet, it's still up in the air. If I do more zombie stuff, I'm not sure I want to do it with TOKYOPOP, I haven't decided yet. Of course if I did more zombie stuff except with another publisher, it wouldn't be The Abandoned, it would be with a completely new cast and setting. I have a bunch of stuff outlined for the second volume and characters mostly designed, and it's sort of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome meets Lord of the Flies…with zombies. [laughs]

It has a tribe of evil post-apocalyptic teens who eat zombie meat, a pseudo-sentient zombie sex slave amputee girl, underwater zombies, and possibly a zombie town.

NRAMA: The printing for The Abandoned is a grayscale book with red tones. Is this something you had in mind from the get-go?

RC: I was originally going to do a straight-up black & white book, but it was TOKYOPOP's idea to add the red and do the rendered markers/ink wash look.

I'm pretty flattered they shelled out the extra dough and everything for the extra color and glossy paper. Though I actually prefer the rougher, standard black & white paper stock, but the color wouldn't have worked on it. It's ironic, though, because it was TOKYOPOP's idea but the color thing ended up turning the whole post-production into a huge mess. Long story. [laughs]

NRAMA: Is it a conscious decision to lean away from digital tones to actual marker tones in your recent work? If so, why?

RC: Um, no, not really, I guess. My first book Spooked [with writer Antony Johnston] was all marker/ink wash tones, so I'm more going back to that. Wet Moon Volume 1's digital tones were an experiment, just trying to figure out how I wanted to do the series and keep myself from over-rendering. I think Spooked was way too rendered; I don't really like super-rendered artwork in comics, so Wet Moon's digital tones were partly an attempt to get myself to reign it in and be really simplified. It only half worked, I just couldn't help getting really detailed. I think for the most part they came out pretty good, though I wish I didn't do so many gradients and just stuck with the flat tones. I like the cell-shading type of look even though I'm not very good at it. But Wet Moon Vol. 2 is a combo of digital and traditional; all the tones on the characters are markers (with a few panels/pages here and there in ink wash) except for the darker-skinned characters, who have digital tones over top of the marker shadows, which is partly to save time and money. Markers run out real quick and are pretty expensive, but I also like the look of the flat tone for dark skin. I did do a couple panels where I colored in the black girls with markers, just for emphasis on those particular shots. Then some of the backgrounds have digital tones, too. I like the combination look, so that's probably what I'll continue with for Wet Moon Volume 3. Wet Moon 2 was originally going to be primarily digitally toned and have select rendered panels like the first volume, but I went with markers once I found that Cleo's black eye looked awful in digital. I still tried to be a lot simpler than my illustration and pin-up work, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

I just can't help but get really detailed with the markers. [laughs]

I'm not sure what sort of tones I'm doing on my secret DC book, I haven't decided yet.

NRAMA: The Wet Moon series has a much larger cast than anything else you've done so far. Looking at the books and your artwork on your website, it's easy to see a lot of thought has been put into it. Can you tell us what Wet Moon is to you?

RC: Wet Moon's definitely my "brainchild" project or whatever, so it's a lot more personal than my other stuff and the characters are really close to my heart. Some of them have been around in one incarnation or another for many years. I think Wet Moon is a lot more pure, unadulterated Ross Campbell Comics than my other work, too: it's all me; the artwork, the story, even the lettering, and there is absolutely zero editorial input or changes. It's a lot more "raw" than say The Abandoned or something, I guess. Me doing comics I love to do without any pressure from anyone with zero restrictions on anything. Oni's really great to work with on that front, because they let me do whatever the hell I want to do. No plot? No problem! Characters saying "____" on every page? No problem! Full-frontal nudity? You got it! [laughs]

There's probably going to be a graphic _______ sequence in the third volume and I wasn't sure if they'd let me do it, but when I asked James Lucas Jones, my editor at Oni Press, he responded with a casual "Sure. Sounds good."[laughs]

But yeah, the only thing that's not done by me in Wet Moon are the diary entries, which I write myself but are handwritten by the lovely Jessica Calderwood. And although I've been told my handwriting looks like a girl's, I think it definitely doesn't fit how Cleo would write, hehheh. And Jess's fits the part perfectly.

NRAMA: How did you go about finding Jessica Calderwood to write for Cleo, and what were you looking for?

RC: I'd known her online and met her in person at the San Diego con a couple years back, and when I did a casting call for girls to submit their handwriting for Cleo's diary, Jess sent hers in, too. I went through a ton of entries, it was really great that so many people sent theirs in, but in the end I not only liked Jess's handwriting, but since I knew her prior to that I knew she was a big fan and trustworthy and that I could count on her to get the stuff done and not flake out or mess up the deadlines or whatever.

NRAMA: Reading over the three volumes of comics you've written and drawn, I've noticed a theme of setting your stories in the south, particularly around the Atlanta/Savannah area of Georgia. Doing some research, you went to school in Savannah at SCAD. What is it about the area that keeps you coming back in your comics?

RC: Hmm, I had to answer this question for another interview I did, but I can't remember what I said. [laughs]

I guess it's the atmosphere, the architecture, the plant-life and swampiness and the Spanish moss, the beachiness of that area, the weather, the super hot, trashy hick girls, and the accents. I love girls with southern accents, whatever region they may be from. I love all the "redneck" communities down there, too, they're totally different from the hick-type/country people up north, that's also a big influence. They have these live oak trees in Savannah that twist and coil around all over the place with Spanish moss hanging from them, it's amazing, and then a few feet away you get this awesome swampland with alligators. I don't know what it is about the south, too, but there's something somewhat scary about it, a different kind of scary than the north has. Where I live the scariness is more "oh ____ that guy's going to shoot you for drug money"

But in the south it's like this weird almost paranormal scariness, I don't know, I can't explain it. Like can you imagine how much scarier Twin Peaks would've been if it was set in Georgia? [laughs]

Not that I would ever change it, I love Twin Peaks just as it is, but if it were set in say, Louisiana it would've had a completely different atmosphere. But we got that in Lynch's Wild at Heart, so it's fine. I love Laura Dern in that movie.

NRAMA: You mentioned you moved out of the south. Can you tell us why you decided to end up where you are?

RC: I was born and raised in Rochester, NY, and I moved back there after I graduated from Savannah, stayed in Rochester for a little while, then moved back to Savannah for a while, then moved back to Rochester again. [laughs]

I left Savannah for a lot of reasons, I guess. one being I was out of money and had to move back in with my parents, plus I had a part-time job waiting for me back home which I really needed since I was broke and had no decent-paying freelance jobs coming in at the time. The other reasons were more personal stuff that I can't really go into, but I also just missed my cats and my parents and everyone from Rochester, so it seemed like the right thing to do. I miss my Savannah friends a lot, too, so who knows, maybe I'll move back there again some day. Sometimes I wish I could combine the two places. Savannachester. Savannah's also kind of a depressing city sometimes, too, although Rochester can be, also. I visited Savannah for a friend's wedding back in May (Riding Shotgun & Sonic the Hedgehog artist Tracy
Yardley) which was a ton of fun, seeing everyone again and all that, but I'd forgotten how much of a dump that city is. [laughs]

Maybe it's gotten more run-down since I left, I don't know, but everything's really polarized there. The historic district is totally gorgeous and really well kept, but everything else is a total trash heap. Every area is either really nice or really crappy, nothing in between. I also forgot how hot the girls in Savannah are. maybe it's the art school presence or something, I don't know, but out of all the places I've ever been to (although I'll admit I'm not much of a traveler) Savannah has the hottest girls ever. How I missed going past Forsyth Park and seeing the droves of skanky art school girls or equally skanky ghetto redneck girls. I think if moved back, I'd want to live on Tybee Island or something, that's a really great place. Tybee also has super hot girls, too.

NRAMA: Another thing I've noticed, and applauded, is your ability to draw, and glorify, the non-stereotypical female form in comics. Is it a conscious decision to deviate from the "comic" norm, or just a natural extension of what your brain creates?

RC: It's a natural extension, definitely. I just draw the girls I want to draw, be they skinny or chubby and regardless of their ethnicity or whatever. I think if you start consciously deviating from something just for the sake of deviating, something's wrong there and you should just sincerely do what you feel like doing. So no, it's not a conscious thing; I just like all types of girls and try to represent them in my work. And my stuff is a lot more down-to-earth than much of comics, I think, and even though my characters are still stylized and cartoony, I want things to mimic real life and in real life every girl is different. I try to capture that.

NRAMA: Given your admitted long-time fan relationship with comics, what would you say about the stilted tradition of having women stereotypically drawn all with similar body-types?

RC: I don't have a problem with it at all. men are drawn the same way, it's not like only female characters are done that way; Captain America has the same build as Superman or Black Panther or whoever. I guess some male characters are slightly different, like Wolverine is shorter and stockier and the Hulk is just gigantic, but every artist is going to draw the characters differently, too. Both mainstream male and female characters are impossibly proportioned, but that's the style. And yeah, it's just the style of these types of comics, too. It would be interesting to see more realistic-proportioned characters in X-Men or something, but it's just not that type of book, and that particular type of traditional artwork works for it. And artists are always gonna draw what they like to draw, you know? No harm in that. I think comics is the same as any other medium, too: like all the mainstream movies in Hollywood feature really classically attractive, publicly-accepted women, which is fine, they're hot too, but once you get into the more indie stuff that's where you get a broader spectrum of female characters/actors. Same with comics.

I think there's definitely an occasional air in comics that gets me shaking my head, like with the more blatant, purely exploitative way that some artists draw women, like a lot of the Avatar Press type stuff or.. heh, I don't want to name names here. but which again is fine, it's just a little hard to take seriously sometimes and I think no wonder people laugh at comics. [laughs]

But in any case, I love X-Men too.

NRAMA: Browsing through your website, I noticed you doing a lot of superhero pin-ups recently. If I remember correctly, several years back you did an April Fool's announcement that you were drawing New X-Men. What are the chances of you ever diving into superhero comics?

RC: [laughs]

Yeah, that X-Men/April Fool's thing was two years ago, I think.
Like I said I love X-Men, I would ____ my pants if I got to an issue or some filler/back-up story kind of thing. I really want to do an Ultimate Generation X limited series or something, so I could revamp those old characters and start over and get to use the characters that are dead or depowered in the main universe. Gen X had some awesome characters, I love Penance and I could erase her crappy origin story they did after Lobdell left, and I'd love to do Jubilee, Husk, Chamber, M, Skin... and I'd put Marrow on the team 'cause she's my favorite and they crapped her up a lot in the main universe, and I think she's depowered now thanks to Decimation.

Blah. I also want to do a new Sleepwalker limited series thing, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he's a mostly-forgotten character from the 90s, but he's my favorite superguy. I'd love to bring him back, even for just a few issues. But I haven't thought of anything really fresh and interesting for either idea, especially for Generation X. it would have to be something really different from Marvel's other X-books. I read an interview where Joe Quesada said that he's gotten a bunch of new Generation X pitches that were all rejected because they weren't saying or doing anything different than the other series in the line. So I have to think of something really good beyond just mutants fighting other mutants with cool powers.

NRAMA: At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con you had a mini-comic out called Mountain Girl. Flipping through it, it's a pretty brutal barbarian piece. Can you tell us about the book, and if people can still get copies of it?

RC: The character in Mountain Girl, Naga, is from a role-playing campaign I run with a friend, and I decided to do a comic about her since I like barbarians so much. She's the princess of a post-holocaust future tribe of mystic cannibal barbarians called the Humunga who live in the ruins of a super-continent made entirely of garbage, junk and debris. it's based on a lot of American Indian, Australian, African, Icelandic, Polynesian and Greek mythology and folklore with my own ____ thrown in. so yeah, in the comic I had Naga leaving her home in the Trashlands to go up north and slay this spirit animal demon called Wishpoosh, a giant evil beaver god who's felled all the frozen forests in the tundra to make his gigantic, million-mile dam, making all the trees undead and their spirits into hollow husks. So Naga goes up there as part of her wedding ceremony (she's married to her brother and they produce many huge, disgusting, inbred cannibal offspring in true Greek god fashion) and she kills a polar bear spirit and he grants Naga his powers and knowledge to fight Wishpoosh. Naga carves little images of the creatures she kills onto her body, so if I do another comic with her she'll be covered in scarification and tattoos. I still have some copies left and I'm getting more soon, so I'll be selling them through my website eventually and hopefully at future cons, too.

NRAMA: Looking at your body of work, one thing I'd have to complain about is the format size. Any hopes that you might do work in a larger format someday?

RC: I love the size of the Wet Moon books, but I didn't like how The Abandoned turned out. All TOKYOPOP's books have to be the same size for whatever reason and I think my stuff really suffers when it's shrunk down so small. But hopefully in the future I'll get to do something bigger, or at least more books at 6x9, which I think is a perfect size for my stuff.

NRAMA: Wet Moon 2 just came out this summer. What are you working on now?

RC: I'm doing an upcoming secret book with Vertigo editor Shelly Bond, but I can't talk about it yet.

Besides that, I have some work in an upcoming issue of Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mirage, which I hope will open the doors for future TMNT issues. It's really awesome getting to do this, I'm a huge Turtles fan from way back and it's really an honor to be able to do something for Mirage and Peter Laird. And I really want to write & draw my own story for Tales but I haven't come up with anything good yet, I'd love to add my own story to the mythology. Lots of ideas, no good ones.

I'm also brainstorming for a couple other pitch ideas, one involving Gamera/Godzilla-style giant monsters and the other about a "squalor survivor" hot mom (who may not survive her squalor) versus aliens. I also want to do either (or both) a Halloween-style slasher comic or a werewolf comic, but I haven't thought much about those. Maybe something in the future, too, like something in space...

NRAMA: Wow. Tons of ideas. What kind of comics do you want to do ultimately?

RC: I want to keep doing Wet Moon until I can do it no more, and I just want to do the best comics I can do, regardless of the genre. I want to have the Wet Moon characters age, too, partly so I won't be one of those obnoxious older creators who keeps doing books about teens and who obviously has no idea how modern teenagers act, dress, or what they talk like. Plus I think it'd be cool to write stories about Cleo and friends in their 20s and maybe even 30s. I have a few ideas for that already. I guess I don't really know what kind of comics I "ultimately" want to do, but like I said I just want to do the best stuff that I'm able to do and keep pushing myself and the material with each new book. And maybe draw some X-Men.

[RedBaron]

Everyone should check our Campbell's art on deviantart: http://mooncalfe.deviantart.com/

His stuff is exceptional. The Abandoned was a great read. It's nice to see an artist draw women of all shapes and sizes for once.

[Corplos]

I fell in love with Ross Campbell's style with Exalted, this cat is going places.

[Groovie Mann]

Abandoned and Wet moon vol. 2 were amongst my favorite books produced this year. i'd love to see him on Generation X.

[Greg McElhatton]

Ross Campbell's art is so truly amazing. I can't wait for his next book even as I continue to devour Wet Moon 2 over and over again...

[katapult]

Ya, Ross's stuff is amazing. I remember when he did that April Fools joke. The thing is, he really would be great at it. I can't wait to see the turtle's stuff.

[FChamberlain]

I loved the Abandoned and was really looking forward to the trilogy, I believe, that it was touted as being. I knew that Campbell wasn't happy with Tokyopop, but to find out here that he is not even sure that he is going to continue with the series kind of sucks.

[mousefolk]

I'll be picking up that Ninja Turtle stuff

[mrhelm]

Ross Campbell's Turtles will rock.

He and Kirkman should get together and do the Sleepwalker pitch that Kirkman never finished.

[Egg]

Ross's artwork and characters are exceptional! I have not been disappointed with anything I've purchased by him!

[Kristin]

I agree that Campnbell is a fantastic writer and artist! My LCS owner told me about Wet Moon and The Abandoned and they were great. I'm ready for another dose!

[mavinga]

Keep it up, Ross.

[intensity]

wow... even though his artwork is a little mature, I'm impressed by the fact that he wants to do an Ultimate Generation X series. That would be so cool, and would definately get a lot of sales... seeing how well the original series sold. Jubilee, Chamber, Husk, M, Skin, Synch, and Penance need to be in a team together. I'd be so happy.

[Hobowatcher]

I like Mountain Girl from The Lady Killers movie.

[The Mirrorball Man]

Man, we should really clone Ross Campbell. One is not enough.

[Tony Moore]

i gotta say, that guy can freakin' DRAW. he's got some serious moves.

-T

[DFlynn]

Wow, another Rochester native! I still call it my home.

Great work, Ross. I'm enjoying Wet Moon vol. 2 right now, almost finished with it. Looking forward to volume 3.

I'm sure you didn't miss the winters here.