Comics artist Thomas Boatwright grew up in a comics-friendly North Carolinian household. "My dad used to buy a stack [of comics] every week at the drugstore while he did laundry: ended up selling most of them to pay for my food and clothes though. By the time I got around to reading them, he had one brown grocery bag full left. Those are still some of my favorite comics ever."[1] Boatwright also counts Edward Gorey, Charles Addams and Bill Watterson among his many cartooning influences: he clarified, "I like guys who have a style you recognize in like two seconds." (In a
Newsarama interview,[2] he also cited the animator Chuck Jones: Jones' imprint can be seen in
Cemetery Blues' Ridley's and Falstaff's brilliantly funny running poses.)[3]
His great-grandfather owned a junkyard: Boatwright remembered, "I would spend hours just going through that stuff and discovering all these discarded toys, old radios, power tools. A lot didn't work but a lot did. I was fascinated by where it came from and that it ended up here. My great-grandfather would sometimes take all this junk and build birdhouses and whirligig things. That got my attention even more. Seeing something meant for a purpose reused as something completely different. If I ever have a house and land, I'm almost certain it will end up looking like the set of
Sanford and Son."
Boatwright shares a love of cultural detritus with his
Cemetery Blues collaborator, writer Ryan Rubio, whom he met when they were crew for a failed local production: Boatwright was doing the film's storyboards, which perhaps can explain his gift for tableau. In fact, Rubio was rummaging through Boatwright's sketches when he "came across one of a guy in a black suit with an Igor-type fellow killing a vampire. We went back and forth on stuff for awhile and came up with the basic premise of
Cemetery Blues."
Boatwright described their collaborative process thusly: "Working with Ryan is sometimes like working with me from Earth2. We've very similar but different people. We grew up in the same era and watched the same cartoons and played with the same toys. If there's something the other doesn't know about, chances are they'll love it just as much. Ryan is very good about putting a story structure together. He can take some of my random thoughts and work them into something readable."
Boatwright and Rubio's grab-bag approach extends to genre (Boatwright describes
CB as "humor-horror") references ("I like to blend
Cemetery Blues […]. I just take what I like from whatever era I want and leave out everything else. So they make modern references to stuff, but the world they're in isn't modern at all") and pop-culture influences as well.
Both are anglophiles to the point where interviewers ask them if they're British (I had to delete a stray "u" in Boatwright's correspondence), but much of that can be attributed to the British Hammer films they frequently cite as an inspiration of
CB: Boatwright mentioned that "we like to think we're carrying on the Hammer Legacy in some way. We tend to think that
Cemetery Blues is the comic they never produced. Ridley and Falstaff are like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this world. The basic plot and the stories they're in could easily take place without them and be fine Hammer productions."
Indeed, a Hammer film sensibility permeates the comic, from the tone (Boatwright: "I'm not really into guts and gore. I prefer creepy and moody") to the visual style ("I love playing with the light and shadows") to the plots (a man finds his castle haunted after the death of his family;
a huntsman's Mephistophelean bargain is replaced by another's) to the notable architectural designs and layouts of the haunted castles and barfly-encrusted pubs (Boatwright's worked with a lot more interiors in
CB: he might have been assisted by his observation of the same sets, redressed and reused, in Hammer films). It's to Rubio and Boatwright's credit that, for all their metaphorical grave-robbing, these elements come across as fresh and playful: the appearance of a certain very recently over-popular type of undead was not only unexpected, but elegantly drawn, evincing both personality and humor.[4]
Boatwright's current project, a 22-page one shot with SLG called
Zeke Deadwood: Zombie Lawman, was an idea he came up with while at the Kubert School. As with
CB, he supplied the picture and Rubio generated a script. Because of his technical skill, it's difficult to remember that Boatwright is still in the early stages of his comics career, but his art did change from
Poo to
CB:
it became less sketchy, more angular. The subject matter and format switch tightened up Boatwright's drawing and layouts. Boatwright remarked: "My art style is always changing and evolving as I learn new things. I think I'm just starting to get the hang of what works for me and what doesn't.'
Notes:
[1] Also according to Boatwright, "In my baby book my mom wrote ‘looks at Spider-man comics and smiles'."
[2]
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=132692[3] "I like to laugh and think anything and everything can be funny at some point. I'm usually always making a joke, even if it's only to myself. […]. And I get a good laugh out of drawing funny faces."
[4] Oddly enough, the only thing that, apparently, wasn't an influence was the one thing that I immediately thought of when I saw the cover artwork of
Cemetery Blues. I somehow became convinced that Image had had gotten the Dylan Dog license (Dylan Dog is an Italian comics series, created by Tiziano Sclavi, which the existential zombie film
Dellamorte Dellamore (
Cemetery Man) is based on). I made it all the way through editor Kristen Simon's intro before I realized that
CB wasn't Dylan Dog at all. Boatwright commented: "[…] There are some similarities (I've watched it recently and was shocked too). But I think that the creator of Dylan Dog […] and I read and watched a lot of the same movies. I designed Ridley with Nick Cave in mind. There's also more Jughead in Dylan Dog. Falstaff started as a tiny Igor type, but as Ryan and I worked on the character, he became much sweeter and more childlike. I always loved Uncle Fester so his design was a major influence on my own creepy bald man."
Image credits:
The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo Book One [©2007 Dwight MacPherson]
The Unearthed Cemetery Blues [©2008 Ryan Rubio & Thomas Boatwright]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
