Transcript: Brian Apthorp - Comic Book Artist

For Art's Sake
Episode "Brian Apthorp, comic book artist"

Brian: Comic books, for me as a child, as a boy, of course they were almost entirely--well they were entirely a mainstream entertainment, aimed at kids. And for a boy or girl that age, that kind of spectacular fantasy is a natural. It wasn't just the bright colors and the pure fantasies of being strong and powerful and making things happen in the world, but rather a context of drama and exciting things--bigger than my life, but which carried within it, in the very bones of that ink and paper, a subconscious potency of the true emotions of the people who made them.
And those people who I was attracted to were those who had the most dramatic sense; an overt sense of drama, and an overt sense of a grandeur--a grandeur to life. And that really is the essence of what I seek in art, is a resonance of that wonder.
I first worked for Neal Adams' Continuity Comics, and did a number of books for him. Then I pencilled for Dark Horse Comics and then DC Comics, principally Batman & Poison Ivy stories but also Vertigo. I'm so grateful for some of the opportunities I've had to work with, or have my work inked by, artists who I admired deeply: Craig Russell, and one of my best friends in comics, Scott Hampton inked "The Dreaming: Trial and Error" book.
I love "Peanuts" and "Calvin & Hobbes", the beautiful, expressive qualities of them, but my own stuff is inspired by the magic of the physical world; it's fragile miracle. I can't say I achieve this tragic beauty, as I call it, but I realized eventually that was the central motive for drawing the way I do. As for my graphic novel, I had a very creative and reasonably happy childhood at home with my sister and my brother, my parents, but at school it was a totally different story, I didn't seem to be able to make friends and I was quite lonely, particularly in adolescence.
When I was a still a teenager I remember lying on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and thinking to myself how little there was to reflect, in the world of entertainment, the world around me, television, film, whatever--the experience of someone like me. And I made a pact with myself that I would make something, I would do something--I would write a comic book, make a comic book perhaps, that would address those things that I was experiencing and suffering, for people like me.
However the story is not all suffering and angst and anguish; there is humor in it and drama and some romantic stuff, sexy stuff, y'know, god knows. Because it is an attempt, even though it is in dramatic form and has fantasy elements to it, it is an attempt to be as honest as I can be about my own experience, my own consciousness as an adolescent. When you are the most malleable and could become anything, good, bad or indifferent. Even though at the time you may feel oppressed, constrained, limited, and have no view that you have a chance to become anything or to achieve or have any of the things you need so badly. Yet it's all there available to you.
And what a wonderful time; what a wonderful state to be in, if only you knew. If only you knew. But you don't know, and that's crucial. You can't know. And you know, maybe it can't happen, maybe it won't happen--because maybe it won't. But I think, I hope in my story it will happen, it will all happen, in a strange way, but it will all happen.
And the whole thing about drawing comics in a studio space, in your own little spot, with your drawing table and your pencils and your paper, lit by the natural light, and I just thought gosh, that would be such a wonderful way to live. To make art, to tell stories coming out of my own self onto the paper, that would be a dream. And somehow or other, though it took a long time, eventually it did come to me, or I came to it. And I'm sort of amazed at that, that I actually got to do what I dreamed of doing.