Chris Bachalo — Shifting Frames

by Henrik Andreasen

By Katherine Keller
March 9, 2009

I met Henrik Andreasen at my first SDCC standing in line at the Dark Horse booth. We never plan to meet up at any convention, but a combination of tastes, mutual friends, and the fact that we're both journalists means that invariably, we do.

Recently, he made a very generous offer to Sequential Tart — would we be interested in running the English versions of several interviews previously published in Danish? Sequential Tart is very pleased to be the first English language publisher of these interviews with some of Comics' greatest creators.

Henrik Andreasen: How did you get interested in comics?

Chris Bachalo: My parents are from Canada. They moved to California in 1963, and I was born in 1965. Even though they moved to California, they still kept their business in Canada, which meant they went back and forth all the time. The whole family would go to Manitoba, Canada every summer, and it would take 3-4 days to drive. In order to keep us children in the backseat from getting bored, they would buy us some books and games to occupy our time.

One year, when I was 10 years old, we stopped at a drugstore on the way back to California. At the time I was very interested in monsters, Frankenstein, werewolves, dinosaurs and all that kind of stuff, and while going through a rack of comics, my eye caught a couple of them with monsters on the covers. One of them was Man-Thing, and the other one was Swamp Thing, who was fighting a dinosaur on the cover, and I went, "Mom, I want these." My mother bought them, and I read them on the way back and really enjoyed them. I didn't know too much about comics of course, but a friend of mine had, over the summer, gotten into comics also. We discovered our mutual interest and started to go down to the local 7-11 every Tuesday, when the comics came, and I basically started to collect comics from that point on.

When in high school, having reached the age of 16, we had something called career days. The purpose of career days is finding out what you want to do and start pursuing it. I answered all their questions and did all the surveys, and at the end it was deduced that I should be a carpenter. This wasn't the thing for me, because I burn easily in the sun and I'm allergic to dust, so I don't think that was going to work out very well. But it did get me thinking, which was the purpose of the whole program.

I had collected comics for six years at that point and enjoyed it. People such as Bill Sienkiewicz and Michael Golden were slowly turning me on to the artistic side, and I thought that maybe this was something I could pursue. I hadn't, for all intents and purposes, drawn that much. I had done the art doodle on my desk, or in my notebook, when I was bored in class. On occasion I would go over to my friend's house, and I would sit at the kitchen table and do some dinosaur or Godzilla drawings and things like that. So in my last two years in high school I took art and learned all the things about how to turn things into space, draw different shapes and perspectives. After high school I took up illustration and I got an illustration degree at the California State University in Long Beach, CA.

In my last semester there, I put together my own comic and sent it out to all the comic book companies and received rejections all the way around. Some of them sent back big books about how to draw comics, and how to draw period, so that wasn't too promising (laughter). But I kept at it, and a friend and I started to put together a new improved proposal for DC — just a small series. Then a good six or seven months later, DC, who had been going through their submissions files, sent out a little feeler to see what I had been up to. I guess they saw some sort of promise in my initial proposal, so I sent them my new book, which I had just finished with my friend.

About a week later, Richard Brunning, who was in charge of submissions, contacted me and asked if I would be interested in trying out for a new book called Shade, the Changing Man that his wife Karen Berger was about to start with Peter Milligan. I said sure, this was it. They sent me Peter's proposal for Shade, and I did four pages with that, giving them an idea of what I could do with the book and the characters. First time around, they were a little uncertain. I guess Peter was a little unsure of my being able to really stretch things and make them really exciting, weird and mad, like the book was going to be. They asked me if I could do a couple of page samples more. Overnight I managed to squeeze out a couple of really quick pages and sent them in, and they seemed to like them very much. I managed to get the job, which was a dream come true, and I was very very happy. I was a big fan of Peter. I had just read Skreemer, which I thought was a great book, so I was familiar with his work. The Death issue of Sandman had just come out, and I guess they were having problems meeting deadlines. Karen asked me if I wanted to do a fill-in issue of Sandman while I was waiting for the Shade script to be written. This was around August of 1989, and the rest, as they say, is history.

HA: Your first real break on Shade was with the "Changing Woman" story line, which Colleen Doran did. Was it more appropriate that a woman drew this story line, or did you just need a break, period?

CB: That was a big coincidence. Peter wanted to write the "Changing Woman" story line, and I was taking time of to do my Legends of the Dark Knight issue. I mentioned to Karen that I had been doing Shade for a couple of years and I wanted to try some different things. I was only supposed to be gone for a couple of issues, but after the Legends issue it just lead to a lot more. I did Death: The High Cost of Living, I did issue #400 of The Incredible Hulk, and I ended up leaving Shade for six or seven issues, until the Vertigo imprint started.

HA: Was Marvel looking for artists to fill in on The Incredible Hulk after they had just kicked Dale Keown out?

CB: Dale Keown had left for Image and left Bobby Chase in the bin, so she was looking for artists. She managed to get my card through Jimmy Palmiotti, who I had met at a show where I had asked him how to get into Marvel. I was interested in doing some work for them and spreading myself out a little bit. I was really curious about how she found out about me and why she picked me. I had only done Shade, and I had no idea why she would think I could pull off something like The Incredible Hulk. It's such a stretch to go from Vertigo to superheroes.

HA: When you went back to Shade, you only did small parts of the monthly book. Were you stretching your limits doing too much other stuff?

CB: It had a lot to do with the fact that I probably overcommitted myself. It was the first time that I started to get a lot of offers for work, and in a spirit of optimism I thought I could take all this on and do it all right. But all of a sudden, I realized I had this huge amount of work to do and not enough time. What it resulted in was cutting pages here and cutting pages there, and it became very messy, and it was definitely a learning experience. This happened with Ghost Rider 2099, which I originally had turned down when Evan Skolnick offered it to me because I didn't think I could pencil another book. Then he came back to me and asked if I wanted to do breakdowns, and I thought that sounded like something I might be able to do. So against the wishes of Helen, my wife, I took it on and quickly realized I was way over my head. In retrospect it was a valuable learning experience of what I could and couldn't do artistically. I apologized to everybody for the short run on the series, and it made me very careful about what I take on nowadays, so something like this will not happen again.

HA: Who is responsible for the graffiti with the small messages on the walls in Ghost Rider 2099?

CB: I did "Lenny did it" and Mark Buckingham said, "Hi Neil." When Mark is inking the book I always encourage him to add anything he wants, so he does just as much graffiti as I do. In the first issue, there is a big scene with a bike where he wrote, "Helen loves Chris" on the front, and all kinds of other stuff. At the end of a long week, when you have been drawing these countless bricks, even though I like drawing all these bricks because of the effect it gives, you need to do that kind of stuff to lighten things up.

One little thing I used to put in Shade was some Bloom County characters in the background, like Opus and Bill the Cat. If you look in the background of Death and Shade, you will see these characters.

HA: One of your art trademarks is those strange noses you make. However, looking through Ghost Rider 2099 issue four and five, where Mark did the breakdowns, they still have those noses. How come?

CB: (Big laughter) Originally it was just an artistic thing, I was trying to figure out a way to give things more depth, and give the characters more dimension. I started adding these small lines to the nose, to help give the face a bit more of a 3-D profile, and it was working well. I'm not sure how it came about, but a lot of people pointed it out as something I usually do and am associated with. Mark Buckingham, who admits he is emulating my style to a certain degree, has kind of picked up some of my trademarks. With Ghost Rider 2099 they are making a very deliberate attempt in the issues I'm not doing, to keep the look of the book the same, and that is why small details as the noses are still in there.

HA: Another of your trademarks is the blurred pictures. Are the pictures printed directly from your pencils, or do you use some other means to get this effect?

CB: I use my pencils, exactly as you deduced. I did it a lot in Shade, where I would add a little more texture to the page, making it a little bit more interesting. Maybe there was a particular sequence going on, where it would be appropriate to change the flow of the book. I would take my pencils and go to the Xerox machine and I would change the size and paste it on the board.

HA: To get the right emotions through?

CB: Yes, but again it depends on what is happening in the story. It is something I haven't done in a while, I kind of refrain from doing it. I guess it was a stage, but maybe I'll do it again sometime.

HA: All the strange things you are drawing when Shade uses his powers, is that something you have picked up from Steve Ditko (who drew the originally series)?

CB: No, to be honest I really didn't. With all due respect, I never was a big fan of his work, which I hardly ever looked at. When I was doing Shade I wanted to have a sharp contrast between the reality and the madness. In order to do that, I kept the realistic situations very straightforward, very plain, concentrating on telling a story, not doing anything else, letting Peter's words carry you through the book. However, when we got a part where there was a lot of madness and strange things going on, I deliberately wanted to show that something is changing here. To show the contrast between these two things, I would blow panels apart, change the sequence of the panels, have things fly of the page and all that kind of stuff. That's basically the reason why I did that. I can't say I was influenced by anything else.

HA: Who made the initial approach with Death: The High Cost of Living?

CB: That was Karen Berger who called and asked if I wanted to do it. It was as simple as that.

As far as the Endless Universe, everything goes through Neil first, so I'm sure she talked to him about it, and he was familiar with my work, having worked with him on Sandman. He had a great appreciation for the way I told a story, and my attention to details making it more interesting. When mentioning names, my name came up, and Neil was very excited that I was available to do it. They called and asked me, and it didn't take me long to think it over. I would just love to do it, and I think at the time it was one of the premier assignments in the industry. It was an immensely popular character to a lot of people. I can’t tell you how flattered I was by this invitation to do it — talk about sweating bullets.

After I got off the phone with Karen, it was like "Oh my God". Mike Dringenberg had done such a beautiful job in setting the tone of the character, and I thought, "How am I going to do this and make it successful?" Taking a well established character, I was debating whether to emulate what had been done before, or to take my ideas of how she should be and make her mine. That was something I was thinking about right until the day I started drawing it. I finally came to the conclusion that I should do my own version of the character and hope it flies, and I think it worked out well.

HA: How was it to work with Neil compared to Peter?

CB: I never talked to Peter that much — if we talked once or twice a year that was a lot. I being so new to the industry, I was very comfortable about sitting back and letting him be the engineer of the book. I was just a passenger, because I knew that he had a much better grasp of comics than I did. Up to the point where I started drawing Sandman and Shade, I had never drawn a book every month. Usually when I did a book with my friends, it would take six or seven months, and I would have a lot of time to think about it. So with Shade I pretty much sat back and let Peter do the story; we never talked about what concept we were doing. Peter pretty much let me go where I wanted to go with the story, and he trusted me with that. I'm eternally grateful to him for letting me do what I wanted with the characters creatively.

Neil is very much the same way, except that I talk a little bit more with Neil. Neil wants to know what I'm thinking. He, just like Peter, encourages me to add anything I want to add to the story. He likes to get feedback, and that's why he likes to work with me. He can throw an idea out to me, and I can come back with something that will add to the story, and give it more depth. Unlike a lot of other writers, Neil will write for the artist he is working with. He knows their strengths and weaknesses, and write the script for them.

With Death and The Children's Crusade, which came later on, he gave me an immensely flattering lot of room on these books. He gave me very little directions, other than a lot of cue words like, "throw in a warehouse where there is a lot of junk", and then left it up to me to fill the page. Neil would tell me that Death and Sexton are going through some boxes, but he doesn't tell me what they find. He gives me a little bit of dialog, and it is up to me to come up with what the characters are doing while they are talking, to make it more interesting. I could do a lot of head shots, but when I'm reading a book I don't want to look at a lot of heads talking, it's kind of boring. It is nice to see if the characters are walking around the room, or just sitting playing with their fingers, being tired or nervous. How are they sitting in the room, is it dusty, are there newspapers lying around, so there is a lot to take into consideration.

With Neil giving me all the room he is, I thought, there is all this junk around and Neil did say that it should be old stuff, since it has been sitting around for a while. So they find stuff from the 50s — ties and early 60s ties — like old bowling pins, and there is a scene where Death is holding a Roy Orbison album. Little things like that is stuff I can go into and have fun with, and Neil gives me the room to do that.

Peter still gives me a lot of directions, more so to make me comfortable knowing that he is comfortable about me adding or changing panels in order to make the story flow better, and he seems to be pretty happy about it. Whereas Neil has reached the point where he doesn't give me panels anymore, he is giving 90% dialog-necessary directions, and I decide on how many panels I use on a page. Which is why I think at the end of the second issue of Death, I had kind of worked myself up in a corner, where I had to put fifteen or sixteen panels in the last two or three pages. I was getting the issue in bits and pieces, but some of the fault was mine. I had a couple of pages with big splash designs, and then I found myself with a lot of story and dialog to tell, and only two or three pages to go, so that was a learning experience.

HA: How did the mix-up with the printing in issue three happen?

CB: Shelly Roeberg just came on, and she was very new to the system, and we had this double-page spread at the end of issue three. Neil and I told Shelly a few times that we've got to make sure that the ad placement in this book is so that the centerfold will open up appropriately. She and we all told the printers this three or four times. Unfortunately the third issue had to be done in a hurry. I ended up penciling the book in three weeks and one day, where I normally use four weeks, because the deadlines were becoming very tight.

When they send things to the printers, they usually give them three weeks, in order for them to prepare it and lay it out, and they send in proper proofs to the editors so they can look at it. With issue three of Death, they had a week to turn it around, and I think somewhere along the lines, some of the messages got crossed and the ad placement was wrong, and we had a real strange centerspread. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but the printers reprinted the book with no cost to the retailers, so it worked out well, and it ended up being four issues after all.

HA: Could you tell us something about the new Death miniseries, which is supposed to be out in '95?

CB: At this point I really can't tell you that much. What I can tell you is that it is going to be called Death: Time of your Life, and it is going to come out immediately after the Sandman series comes to an end. I was originally supposed to begin penciling the book September this year, but Sandman, which was going to end at issue 67, now looks like it is going to end at issue 75. I got put back because Sandman got put back. I think Neil had some more stuff he wanted to add, so at this point it looks like it is going to start around September '95. It will come out as four issues each with 26 pages.

HA: Will any of the other Endless be appearing?

CB: At this point I don't know. Up until a month or two ago Neil didn't know what he wanted to write about. At this point I can't really tell you what it is about, since it is such an early stage, and I don't feel comfortable about revealing what it is about right now. Sorry.

HA: We will just have to wait and see. The book you are working on now is Generation X, which is the newest mutant book from Marvel. How much influence have you had in creating these characters?

CB: Between Scott Lobdell, the writer, and me, I would say it has been a good 50/50 split. When they originally presented the idea of the series to me and offered me the work, I was knee deep in a contract on Shade. I couldn't and I wouldn't depart from Shade, I wasn't quite finished, and I wanted to go up to 50.

They offered me the job immediately after X-Men Unlimited #1 came out. I think they were very happy with what I did with that, and they thought I would be a good artist to work on that book. Marvel was very gracious in waiting for me to finish my commitments and contracts with DC at the time. Scott was very nice in terms of wanting us both to create the characters, so we both had an interest in the characters, instead of just one of us.

Usually when you have more than one person involved you get better stuff too, because you get a better perspective and more ideas. We created seven new characters for this book, and added The White Queen, Banshee, and Jubilee, who are established X-Men characters. Scott came up with the initial concept for Synch, Husk, Chamber, Penance and Mondo, and I came up with M and Skin. After that, he would give me an idea of what this person could do, and we would go back and forth from there, and we each added some of our own personality and ideas to the characters. I created the entire look for the book, as far as what the art is going to look like, what all the characters look like physically.

One of the most torturous three days in my life was coming up with what the uniforms were going to look like. I wanted something that was modern and practical, not something a lot of the characters are wearing nowadays, like shoulder pads and the next-to-nothing clothes. It is not very realistic, and I'm a very realistic oriented person. I wanted them to be practical so they could run or fly around without looking strange, and then if the clothes got dirty they would just throw them in the washing machine, and put them on again. I also wanted to keep in mind what had already been established with the X-Men, what Jack Kirby's initial design for the outfits had been, and some of the things Jim Lee had done. When trying to come up with something, I borrowed a little from Judge Dredd, Moebius, and Jim Lee, and I threw it all together and I think I came up with some really nice and practical uniforms. I think I solved what I wanted to solve, and I'm really very happy with it.

HA: Wasn't it hard to work on something that has all this established history behind them?

CB: That was very intimidating, much like when I worked on Death. I had a decision to make, about what direction I wanted to go with it. Both tasks were intimidating, because there were already established a lot of history, especially with the X-Men, who have been around for 30 years. Also, all the people associated with that book are legendary, so that was kind of scaring for a while, and I wasn't that nice to be around, just ask my wife. But eventually I came to the conclusion that I should just do as I usually do, which is to sit down and come up with my best ideas of what I really like and think will work, and hopefully someone else will like it too. I try not to pay attention to all the pre-history.

HA: For the average Marvel fan, who is at least five or ten years younger than your present fans, you will appear to be a new artist. How do you feel about that?

CB: That my audience would change dramatically and become much younger was another thing to consider. Not to slight Marvel Comics, but Vertigo is very writer-driven, whereas Marvel Comics are very artist-driven and more of a visual medium.

The importance in telling a story is less for Marvel, which sounds like it is a bad thing, but it is not. That is not what the genre is about, kids are not going to identify themselves with that. Going into it, I knew I had to address a few different things, and maybe work on combining a little of everything. I still wanted it to be a book that would appeal to as many people as possible, and still keep in mind that my general audience is male and between the age of 12 and 18.

I'm very conscious about the fact that I have to keep it visually interesting, and that there are more splash pages than I'm used to doing from my Vertigo work. The features of the characters are more exaggerated; if someone is yelling, they are really yelling. It is more like opera, big and exaggerated. You want the person on the first row and the back row to have the same experience. That is why you want to have everything really big, bold and exiting. Having a lot of energy hitting you right in the face. With Vertigo it is the drama of the story that carries you through, and I’m trying to combine a little of both in Generation X.

I want to make it fast and exiting, but I also want you to sit back and enjoy the story too, and there is a story. It is not just a series of splash pages, because that is not what I'm about, and something I wouldn't feel comfortable doing. The one element that appeals and is very endearing to me about comics is that I like to tell stories. It is my job to tell the most interesting stories I can, and those are my goals in drawing Generation X vs. drawing Shade or Death.

HA: Having a much different audience now, do you fear the change in response you might get at shows?

CB: I really don't know, I hate to think that far ahead. This year I'm keeping a very low profile. I can't say I'm fascinated about being up there, being a real media type. I'm a little more private than that.

HA: Wouldn't that be a problem, you being the new hot X-artist?

CB: I do what they ask of me, but they asked me to go and do a show in New York and LA and I have turned them down. I explained to them, and they understood completely, that the first and most important priority in this business is to get the work done. I'm not going to get the work done, if I'm going to all these shows. I put a lot into the book, and I work six days a week to get it done on time. From Bob Harras the editor, to all the marketing people, they all tell me that it is a great attitude, and that I should keep it up, because the most important thing is to get the product out on the shelves. The fans don't care if I don't appear and do signings in every city on the continent, they just want to know that every month there is going to be a book coming out, and that they can rely on that. That is why I'm keeping a low profile, in order to get the work done.

HA: That's it. Nice talking to you. I'm looking forward to seeing your new series.

CB: Nice talking to you too Henrik. Thank you very much.

(The interview is copyright Henrik Andreasen, and was conducted at the San Diego Comic Convention in 1994. Published in Seriejournalen no. 20 — Summer 1995)

[Editor's Note: Several minor copy edits were made to Andreasen's original transcripts for the purposes of grammar and syntax.]