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"P. Craig Russell Interview"by Roger A. Ash
Elric, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Sandman
#50, and Operatic adaptations, to name just a few, have all been
illustrated by P. Craig Russell during his career in comics. This
month he returns to Elric with Elric: Stormbringer
from Dark Horse, who will publish the odd-numbered issues, while
Topps will publish the even-numbered issues. Worlds of Westfield
Content Editor Roger A. Ash recently talked with Russell about
Elric and other upcoming work.
P. Craig Russell:
I like to finish what I start. It's been about 17 years all told
since I started working on The Dreaming City which
was from the third Elric novel. We did a couple excerpts from
that, The Dreaming City and then later While
the Gods Laugh and then went back to the very beginning
and started with volume 1 which I adapted with Michael T. Gilbert.
The series continued for a while with volume 2 and then in volume
3 we reprinted some of the material I had originally done around
1981 and there were series after that. We'd talked all along of
some day doing Stormbringer and I really do like
to get a sense of finality or completion with something that I've
talked about for a long time. And of course, it is the ultimate
Elric novel, the ultimate Elric story, so there was that allure
too.
Westfield:
For those who might be unfamiliar with Elric, what can you tell
us about him?
Russell:
Elric is the last emperor of the race of Melniboné, a mystic-warrior-occult
priest line of not-quite-human characters. He's known for both
his powers and his weaknesses, which make him a little more interesting
of a character than a typical superhero. It's also the story of
his runeblade Stormbringer. Actually, in a certain sense, the
whole series is more about the sword than it is Elric. It's the
sword that has the last word in the final novel.
Westfield:
What can you tell us about Elric: Stormbringer?
Russell:
It's the final confrontation between the lords of Law and Chaos
and all of the pawns of the Melnibonéans, and the Lands
Below and all the other races of earth and the end of this bright
empire. It's a very cataclysmic, end-of-the-world sort of story.
Westfield:
How do you go about adapting something like Elric?
Russell:
To me, the adaptation is the most fun part in any project - taking
one form and turning it into another form. I like making a structure.
I Xerox the whole book on large sheets of paper so I have lots
of white space left around the text. I take it a chunk at a time,
reading it over to the point where I almost have it memorized,
to the point where I can visualize the events of the story in
my head. They're not just words on paper, but I can see it almost
as a visual structure in my head so that I can turn around all
of the events and the way they line up. Once I can get those events
lined up in my head, I start thinking of them as separate pictures,
panels, each one related to the other. Then I have to try to design
that down onto a page so that each page feels like a piece in
itself, almost like the stanza of a poem with a beginning, middle
and an end and something at the end that either sums up the page
or throws you onto the next page where you have to turn the page
to see what happens next. It's very analytical and it's emotional
at the same time because you're feeling this story, you have very
strong emotional responses to it, but you have to very coolly
find the pictures that will translate that in such a way that
the readers hopefully will get the same response and, even more
hopefully than that, won't see all the seams and pieces that go
to putting that together. Hopefully it seems seamless.
Westfield:
How much, if any, input does Elric's creator Michael Moorcock
have in the adaptation?
Russell:
He's left us pretty much alone to do as we will. I did the entire
adaptation, wrote it and drew it and had it lettered, and then
sent the whole set to Moorcock. Luckily, he seemed to like it
[laughter].
Westfield:
Elric: Stormbringer is coming out from both Dark
Horse and Topps. How exactly is that working?
Russell:
You should ask me this after the second issue comes out. Dark
Horse will be doing issues 1, 3, 5, and 7 and Topps will be doing
2, 4, and 6. Hopefully it will work out.
Westfield:
How does the Elric: One Life story that you adapted
fit in with this, or does it?
Russell:
It was serendipity. What had happened was, I was adapting Stormbringer
and Neil Gaiman knew that I was working on it and faxed
me this story he had just written for a White Wolf anthology of
numerous authors doing their own Elric stories or some kind of
a story that had to do with Elric. Neil's was a recollection of
growing up, going to boarding school, and being the boy-with-a-book,
and, as a boy, how enamored he was of the Moorcock novels; just
having to have the new one. And this was at a period of time when
Moorcock just seemed to be doing one novel after another. His
favorite character was Elric, and his favorite Elric novel was
Stormbringer. At the same time, Neil and I had worked
together a couple of years previous on Sandman #50
and had found it to be a terrific experience working together
and wanted to do it again. With our schedules, we're having a
hard time finding what and when and where and how. This to me
seemed a natural. Here was this story he had already written and
he didn't have to do anything else. I could do the adaptation,
do a comic script from it and provide the pictures. That gave
us a chance to work together again. It provided something of an
introduction to the Elric mythos and hopefully would also act
as a critical spur to the Neil Gaiman fans who would read the
book and then might be interested in reading something by Moorcock,
or at least an adaptation of Moorcock.
That went fine, except that, for one
reason or another, and I to this day don't really know what, Topps
just didn't get around to publishing Stormbringer
right after that. It was designed to be a lead-in and one month
later, Stormbringer would start. That never happened.
Almost 6, 8, 10 months later, we approached Dark Horse, who I
just signed a six year contract with to produce another project,
with the idea of publishing Stormbringer and they
talked to Topps, and between them all they decided to co-produce
it.
Westfield:
Aside from Elric, you've also been working on The Fairy
Tales of Oscar Wilde. Do you have any idea when the next
book in that series will be out?
Russell:
No I don't. I was supposed to do the third one this summer and
I've actually written and laid out another one, but NBM counts
on simultaneous publication in several countries and getting all
those companies lined up isn't always easy. So for right now,
the project is on hold. They're also shopping around another book
of mine at the same time trying to find co-publishers. So instead
I took that break I had, that hiatus from my Dark Horse contract
this summer, to do a 48-page Dr. Strange story for Marvel. It's
all done and at the colorist now. I've been told it's being solicited
for Jun '97.
Westfield:
Is this the first time you've done Dr. Strange since the Annual
from the late '70s?
Russell:
Yes. And as a matter of fact, what started it was Mark Andreco,
who scripted this book, suggested when I had this hole in my schedule
that I call Bob Harras and suggest reprinting the Dr. Strange
Annual with new pages. I've tried to do this every five
years, ever since it came out in '76. So I did and Bob went for
it. I told him I just needed to add 13 new pages. Well, I pulled
out my old artwork and it just looked completely wrong to me.
If nothing else, the styles would no longer mesh. So I ended up
redrawing the entire thing, which was an interesting exercise,
to take the same picture and either totally reconceptualize it,
in other words, throw out the old picture; or simply using the
same layout or design, redraw it with better anatomy and draftsmanship,
better structural detail underneath it. So that's what I did,
and we added new story, we changed the plot somewhat, threw out
the old script, wrote a new one and just refashioned it to the
point where I considered it a completely new piece. Although if
anyone wants to have fun with it and get the old Annual and go
through it and see what is similar and what is dissimilar, it
could be a fun game in itself. There are pages where you'll see
the layout is identical. I used one single panel from the old
Dr. Strange Annual, just to put it in there to see
if anyone could find it if they looked hard enough.
Westfield:
Do you adapt all the stories in the same way you described earlier,
like the Oscar Wilde stories for example?
Russell:
Yeah. I Xerox the whole thing so that I can lay out pages in front
of me instead of just flipping back and forth through the book.
Then I can underline it and then make sketches right beside it
on the white part of the paper. When I get those little thumbnails
done, then I lay them out on large sheets of paper and letter
them all in and rule the panel borders so sort of the skeleton
of the story is there. I might not actually draw the thing for
several years. I've got The Fisherman and His Soul, which
I did last summer, a 44-page Oscar Wilde story sitting in my drawer
and a 15-page Oscar Wilde story called The Devoted Friend.
Those are all scripted and laid out. I don't know when I'll get
to them. Right now I'm laying out and adapting Wagner's Ring
and I have about 124 pages of that done.
Westfield:
Is that the Dark Horse project you mentioned earlier?
Russell:
Yeah. That's the big Dark Horse project. So, after I do these
layouts, then I start the research work. I use friends as models
to act out a lot of this stuff since I don't consider myself a
natural draftsman. Left to my own devices, my anatomy is way too
shaky. So, I research everything so that I can get it right and
there's that whole phase of the process and then I actually start
the drawing.
Westfield:
Since you do have such a detailed style, how long does it take
you to do a page once you start drawing?
Russell:
Once I start drawing, depending on the complexity of the page,
I can pencil and ink a page a day. On this Dr. Strange piece,
which is one of the most visually dense pieces I've ever done,
on a good day I could do a half to two-thirds of a page.
Westfield:
Do you have any other projects coming up aside from what you've
already mentioned?
Russell:
The Ring is the big project. What I've got going
with Dark Horse is that I'm supposed to work four months out of
the year inking various projects, like I just did the Star
Wars: Shadows of the Empire series. The other eight months
will be spent working on the Ring. For the first
two years, and that's this past year and this next summer, I've
got two months off to work on other projects, presumably the Oscar
Wilde books. So next year I might get the chance to do the Oscar
Wilde if we work things out with NBM. Hopefully I will. I had
hoped to get them all done before I started the Ring,
but we just came up against it and now seems to be the time to
do it.
Russell:
It was a real satisfaction to me on doing Stormbringer
to get to do the script myself. When I was doing the earlier ones,
I was approaching it in much the same way, the difference was
that Roy Thomas was giving me a synopsis to start with that structured
out the story, either the individual stories, or as in the first
novel that I did with Michael T. Gilbert, the six issues. But
then I always went back into the book and did pretty much the
same thing I'm doing now, which was to decide what dialogue exactly
was being said, not just doing sort-of pantomime of people talking,
but figuring out line by line where it came from Moorcock. This
was a terrific apprenticeship way to work into doing adaptations.
I could do that and still not be responsible for the final script,
Roy always wrote that. No matter how well you work with another
writer, there's always going to be places where you look at it
as an artist and say no I would have done that differently and
they should not be speaking here, or there should be two word
balloons or three or whatever. To do the script myself was the
main reason for me to do Stormbringer and one of
the reasons it took so long to get around to doing the adaptation
is because I insisted that I would only do this project if I could
do the scripting and the adaptation myself. So that was a rewarding
thing to do.
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