A conversation with the very accomplished comic book illustrator and fantasist Charles Vess
by Mike Gibson
Like those of many other pre-adolescent boys of his era, Charles Vess's childhood fantasies were rooted in the jungle-pulp exotica of Tarzan novels, in the waddle and whimsy of Disney's Uncle Scrooge comic books.
But while most of those peach-faced kids gave up those fantasies (perhaps after a few years of fanatical comic book collecting and Saturday sci-fi matinees), Vess channeled his other-world obsessions first into a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Virginia Commonwealth University, and then into a career as one of the most polished and well-regarded comics illustrators of our day.
"I think I started drawing as soon as I could pick up a crayon and get to a wall," Vess laughs, seated in front of an easel in his studio in southwestern Virginia. Vess will be the guest artist at Knoxville's ConCat12 Science Fiction Convention on Nov. 24-26 at the Hyatt Regency.
"I told my mom when I was very young not to read me fairy tales," he continues. "I think I had a problem because I could imagine them too well."
Vess is a friendly sort, accommodating, engaging, voluble. He's also wholly absorbed by his work; at one point during a conversation, Vess stops, surveys the brush strokes he has just set to canvas, and exclaims, "Wow, that's a really neat dragon!"
A writer as well as an artist, Vess is possessed of a style that's all graceful elegance and magic realism, with elaborate, flowing imagery that's balanced by warm-hearted, almost cartoonish detail. His art has graced hundreds of magazines, comic books, and graphic novels over the course of his 30-year career, including a few heralded forays with Marvel Comics' resident web-slinger, Spider-Man, and an award-winning collaboration with Neil Gaiman on the writer's epic fantasy series the Sandman.
His current project—which occupies his brush even as he speaks to a reporter—is a painted 120-page prequel to writer/artist Jeff Smith's acclaimed Bone comic book series. Entitled Rose, the prequel will explore the mythos of the lushly fantastic magic valley where Smith's simply-rendered, Pogo-like Bone characters found themselves lost in the original series.
"It'll be drawn like me, not like Bone," Vess says, explaining the dichotomy between Bone's fat-lined simplicity and his own highly ornamented style. "I adapted it to fit me; it's before the Bone creatures came to the valley. It's high fantasy, dragons and talking dogs."
Vess says he "always knew [he] wanted to be an illustrator," and produced his own homemade comic books as a child. The budding painter/conceptualist often drew on the old Prince Valiant newspaper strip, which even today figures heavily in his intricately conceived renderings.
He attended Virginia Commonwealth University in his home state in the 1970's, availing himself of their fine arts program in an era when specialized academic programs for illustrators didn't exist. "It was all abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollard and big fields of color," Vess remembers. "Anything with a narrative bent, they would laugh out of class."
But Vess survived with his comic book chops and his boundless imagination intact. While at VCU, he befriended an up-and-coming comic artist named Michael Kaluta—now an esteemed figure in the comics industry—and moved to New York to try his hand at freelance illustration at Kaluta's urging.
Vess was in his mid-20s, rooming with a successful artist in the Big Apple, and the experience afforded him the opportunity to meet other artists, writers, art directors working in the industry. His ascension up the freelance pecking order was slow, but inevitable. "I learned to do my laundry in the bathtub, and I learned to hate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches," Vess says.
"Kaluta gave me some good advice early on: Take something because you want to, not because you have to. Of course, sometimes you have to be pragmatic."
Of the literally hundreds of comic book and magazine illustrations Vess has rendered in the years since, he looks most proudly on his Gaiman collaborations, and on his dalliances with Marvel's Spider-Man, another childhood favorite. An acclaimed graphic novel, Vess's 1990 Spirits of the Earth figured the big-city webslinger into the rolling hills and sparse, pastoral countryside of Scotland—far removed from the rooftops and high rises that typically act as pommel horses for his urban gymnastics.
"It's Spider-Man in Scotland swinging off castles instead of 50-story buildings; I thought it would be interesting to take him out of that environment," says Vess.
But Vess's forte is high fantasy, not spandexed vigilantes, and most of his work reflects his preferences: stints in comic book fantasy magazines Heavy Metal and Epic, fantasy/horror comics such as Sandman, painted covers and illustrations for any number of books and graphic novels—adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan and Grimm's Fairy Tales...
"I have a hard time drawing super heroes," says Vess. "It's all 'Who's got the biggest fist?' I just don't think that way. I'd rather be doing gentle, whimsical fantasy stuff."
Of more than a half-dozen major industry writing and illustration recognitions Vess has received since 1990, his best-known citation is probably a 1996 Will Eisner Comics Industry Award for his Gaiman collaboration on Sandman issue 75, "Tempest."
A comics writer of unparalleled literary sophistication and storytelling acumen, Gaiman found in Vess a superb artistic foil; the two collaborated on three Sandman stories, and later partnered on Stardust, a "fairy tale for adults" penned by Gaiman and animated by 175 exquisitely-wrought Vess paintings and illustrations.
"[Gaiman]'s such an interesting, literate writer," Vess says. "He has this wonderful subtext of literacy, whereas many writers, their subtext is the Legion of Superheroes from 20 years ago. It was easy, a short-hand writing experience. He'd mention something and I'd go 'Yeah!' instead of elaborately discussing the concept.
"The better your collaborator, the better your work. It's hard to get excited about something that isn't that good. There's a lot of bad writing out there, and unfortunately, I've had to illustrate my fair share of it."
Another of Vess's favorite co-conceptualists is his friend Charles De Lint, guest writer at this year's Knoxville convention. "I love the way he thinks and writes," says Vess, who worked with Delint to adapt a series of Scots-Irish ballads to a graphic novel format. "I like the way he integrates myth and fantasy into the real world."
The Knoxville area holds a special place in Vess's heart, as his wife of 13 years Karen Shaffer graduated from the University of Tennessee's public relations program. (She worked for years as an obit writer for a certain daily newspaper) The couple have made several trips to the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the years since, and perhaps not a few of Vess's thickly forested fantasy worlds have been inspired by those Appalachian visitations.
"We honeymooned in the Smokies," Vess relates. "I had never been there, and it was like 'Whoa!' I thought it was beautiful. I only wish the leaves were still out this time around."
Indeed, two upcoming Vess projects will take as their setting Knoxville's mountainous ramparts; both a children's book and a young adult novel currently in the conceptual stage will be placed in the Appalachians. Vess says he hopes to reach the hearts and imaginations of those young readers in much the same fashion that his own soul was taken captive by Burroughs and Disney and Prince Valiant all those years ago.
"Hopefully, some kid will see my work, and it will have some the same fun, the same action-adventure those old Uncle Scrooge comics had for me," Vess says. "And who knows? Maybe that kid will start reading and drawing."
November 16, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 46
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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