It was during the halftime special on Super Bowl Sunday when Cliff Chiang got an email from Neil Young.
He just didn't know it was from Neil Young.
It said "This is an email for Cliff. I know you're very busy, but is there any way you could work on
Greendale...they're going in a different direction with it and I'd really like to have you on it. Is there any way you could work on it within the next year or so? Please let me know." It was signed "ny". Who the hell was sending me this? I couldn't even conceive of it at the time. "NY". What the...New York? And then I was like, "Duh!" I called Jenny over and said, "Look at this." And she asked, "What are you gonna do?"
Saying that "it was a long road to that moment" is beside the point. The ease with which a comics artist can get their personal stories out into the public forum has revealed the inherent myth of the "how to make it" story. Unique careers aren't the exception; they're the rule, as any google search or twitterfeed can prove. Chiang—an Ivy League graduate going through his youth bearing the familial expectation of becoming a lawyer--is yet another example of why you should never trust anybody who tells you they've found a secret passage.
Editor turned exclusive-to-DC freelance artist, one of the rare few who jumps back and forth between titles as divergent as The Brave and The Bold
and DMZ
(with a Justice League: Generation Lost
cover thrown in the middle), Cliff's history is specific and unusual, a casual example of the choices he's made. From an outsider's perspective, it could appear that he doesn't know how to manage his own career. It isn't true.
But you could certainly be forgiven for thinking along those lines.
After dual summer internships—one at Marvel Comics, the other at a Soho art gallery—Chiang used his Harvard English degree as the foot-in-door for an editorial job at DC Comics. The job at DC wasn't taken on a whim. After spending a summer at Marvel, reading Doom 2099
scripts and watching how the office went about its business, he made the decision that a job in comics (any job, even "cleaning the bathrooms") was the next step on the road to a professional art career. Working as an assistant editor on Vertigo titles like Books of Magic
and Transmetropolitan
during the day, his nights were spent honing his penciling skills. Eventually, he was able to get some drawing work in the Parodox Press' "The Big Book Of Grimm", but the work was hard to come by, and the schedule (drawing by night, editing by day) was hard to bear.
You wouldn't guess that by talking to him. For Cliff, those early years were a necessary struggle, a time period rife with the education he couldn't have found in school. When he describes those days, days where he obsessively "inhaled" comics and Comics Journal interviews, he has a crisp recall of how what he was learning—from production rules to storytelling tricks—was shaping the career he dreamed of having. After reaching what seemed like a natural endpoint for his time as editor, he left the job to pursue freelance work. The jobs came consistently, but in drips and drabs. His free time was spent assisting Walt Simonson and Stephen DeStefano.
One of his first art gigs for DC was an installment in "Golden Age Secret Files". Along with the chance to draw Superman, the job brought a few painful minutes along with it.
Tony Bedard gave me the job based off what he'd seen in the Big Book of Grimm, which had a real slick, Steve Rude quality to it. He'd liked that, and thought it would work for the story in
Golden Age, which was basically a story about Superman researching the Crimson Avenger. What I didn't tell him was that I had already decided that I never wanted to work in that style again after Grimm. I didn't have control over my inks, and I'd become obsessed with the idea of creating bolder artwork, going more into the vein of Alex Toth and Tony Salmons.
I didn't give him any warning when I brought the pages in, and they had these really thick, fat lines, and Tony looked at them, and he just went: "huh." So I asked him what that meant, what did he think, and he said "It's not what I expected. It looks kind of crude." I played it off, said something like "Yeah, I feel pretty good about it" and "modern sensibilities", and he said "Well, just keep working on it", and I got out of there. I went off to the copy room, and I was crushed. I was just standing there, trying to compose myself, thinking that I'd just screwed up my career and gone too far, thinking how big a job this was, asking myself why I'd been so ballsy and gone so far...and then he came into the room and started xeroxing the pages. He was reducing them down to 66%, to get an idea of what they would look like when the comic was actually printed, and he's looking at them, and he finally turns to me and says, "Sorry. I'm an asshole. These are great."
When Cliff describes that moment in the copy room, he glosses right over that moment when Tony Bedard reduced his art down to print size. It's easy to see why—the story is more of a personal moment of triumphant feeling for him, one of those times when making a risky choice paid off—but it's worth stopping to register the facts of why it did "pay off". While still early in his career, he'd already ingested one of the initial stumbling blocks to comic book illustration, the simple fact that the size-you-draw ain't the-size-that's-printed. It's something that some artists never master, that others don't learn until after their work has been obliterated, but for him, it was an expected part of the process. When pushed to explain how he knew to do it, he seems surprised. Eventually, he admits to something he only half-jokingly refers to as "terminator vision", a mode of reading that he'd become obsessed with during his time as an editor. "Inhaling" comics, he stared at the panels, trying to figure out exactly how Jeff Smith was depicting fluid movement in Bone, forcing his eyes to dissect the page to find the pacing; studying, learning, memorizing. The process might have made him a bit contentious at times.
I've gotten away from it a bit in the past few years, but I'm now feeling more the way I did when I started working in comics back in the mid ‘90s. When I started, I felt like everything had gotten so precious, art-wise. I wanted to make marks, these really fat brush lines. To force people to see that what I was doing was also drawing. It doesn't have to look like Todd McFarlane. I ended up getting a lot of jobs that were Golden Age or period pieces. Since then, I've seen things move in that direction. Michael Lark started working in brush, and Darwyn was doing his stuff, and then it felt like there was this whole movement of people doing this classic, noir-ish visual style. And they were so good at it, it made me feel like I needed to change.
That's why you see a shift in the
Human Target stuff, I think it's in issue fourteen, the one with the boy-band priest. It was a reaction to people doing better work in an area that I'd gotten comfortable in. So I picked up and tried to do something else.
Cliff's career as an artist at DC wasn't truly acknowledged by readers until after the release of "Josie Mac", a serialized back-up story in the pages of Detective Comics
focusing on one of Gotham City's many faceless police officers. Hiding behind the "Bruce Wayne: Murderer" and "Fugitive" story arc, "Josie" predated the similar in tone (if not focus) Gotham Central, a police procedural more in line with David Simon's Homicide than anything that had been seen in Batman stories before. Excepting a cover, Cliff never illustrated an issue of that series--instead, the period following "Josie" saw him return to his old editorial stomping grounds at Vertigo, this time to work on another attempt to Vertigo-ize an unused DC character.
At first, the plan with
Beware of the Creeper mini-series was to set in the near future, a totalitarian state. It was basically
V For Vendetta, and when we went to Will Dennis, he suggested that we take it back instead….which is how it ended up being set in 1920's Paris.
Although Beware The Creeper
isn't without interest, (especially if that interest is a prurient one) the five issues failed to catch public attention, and the character was eventually returned to the DC universe. Cliff's work and design sense on the series is solid, but what stands out most is the attention to detail captured in his Parisian cityscapes. Amassing a library of period-specific French photography, his panels of the city by night have an eerie accuracy, giving the book a lurid quality that stock rooftops would've failed to deliver.
After his run on the Creeper ended, Cliff stayed at Vertigo for a run on Peter Milligan's short lived Human Target
. Despite the early cancellation of the title, Cliff's recollections of that time are tied up in a feeling of ambitious obligation.
We had plans for further arcs, but we knew it was going to be shut down fairly early. I think Peter [Milligan] probably had those last three issues in his back pocket. It's such a return to the first graphic novel. I was actually working as an assistant editor at Vertigo when that first one was coming out, and I remember meeting Eddy [Edvin Biukovic] and all those other Croatian guys, like Esad Ribic and Goran Sudzuka, for the first time. They came through the Vertigo office that first year on their way to San Diego, and a week later they all came back with these statues, all that stuff you go out to San Diego for. They were total fans. It was great to see them so happy. They were really cool guys, and when they saw that I drew, they were really supportive of that. I think I got a thank you card from Eddy, and it said something like "Hey Superboy, keep drawing." It meant a lot to me at the time. I was in my mid 20's, trying to break out from Vertigo and become a freelancer, and to have encouragement from a guy like Eddy was great. And to later be working on
Human Target, after he'd passed...I felt like I had something to prove there. I wanted to keep up the quality that he'd brought to it. I owed it to Eddy.
After Human Target
, Cliff's career entered another short period of schizophrenia. Multiple covers, a two-issue Zsasz story in Detective Comics
with writer Shane McCarthy, and then, an unusually horrific DCU event spin-off with Will Pfeifer called Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre
. Arriving so soon after Human Target's twisting deception and Creeper's demanding need for research, both the Spectre and the Zsasz story appeared as journeyman work, the sort of get-it-out comics that DC is so often criticized for producing today. But when Cliff talks about that period now, it's as if the experience was nothing more than an opportunity to learn another lesson about the trials of freelancing.
The story itself was just really dark and I couldn't connect with it. But I still wanted to do a good job. It took me twice as long to draw it as it was supposed to, because every day was this uphill battle of trying to find some minor way to bring my personality and interests into the work.
Between the Spectre and those
Nightwing issues [
Cliff drew two issues of Nightwing, including the time period when Dick Grayson was wearing the old armored Daredevil suit and calling himself "Renegade"], I realized that I needed to have more control over my career, that I needed to think ahead about lining up projects so I could be more excited about the work.
It was Brian Azzarello who showed up next. Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality, an eight chapter back-up story hiding in the back of another Spectre comic, served as a bit of a coming out period for both creators--Azzarello, who proved that he was as capable of compelling men-in-tights work without resorting to the cold-blooded violence that 100 Bullets
had earned him a name for, and Chiang, whose expressive take on unknown characters like Genius Jones and Infectious Lass created a sub-industry of ravenous sketch-seekers, all desperate for something of his that they could own themselves. But even more than the content of the story--a sincerely humorous response to the inherent weirdness of "darkening" super-hero characters that concluded with a tongue-in-cheek jab towards DC's most well-known writers--it was the creative relationship between the two men that stood out the most.
Brian knows what he wants. He puts all of it into his dialog and how he sets up a scene. It's pure storytelling in a traditional, oral sense. His art direction is sparse; it's the barest minimum of what you need to know. When you read an issue of
100 Bullets, and it starts off with a panel of a fly, flying around a room, and then it lands on a glass of beer while the bartender is talking to some guy, and then that guy goes to the jukebox... that's all Eduardo [Risso]. He's given the room to do it, and he's got great dialog that has a weight to it and can hold the panel together. Doing comics with Azz is like playing live jazz.
When I was doing that
Brave and the Bold thing, I was told: "Don't change a thing. Here's the script, it's great, we love it. Play it." That's sheet music. Sometimes that works great, but on a creative level, doing sheet music is drawing someone else's visual ideas and ultimately, I'm in this to tell stories.
I didn't know where the hell Azz was going with
Doctor 13, initially. He told me "it's Jonny Quest, but the Adult Swim version. There's going to be vampires, pirates and shit. You in?" And I said, "Sure." Because all I was getting was
Gotham Central kind of stuff, like "we got this cop story you can do!" It's about..."cops! It's the night before he gets shot! And then he comes back!"
But I didn't know where it was going. Azz had an idea for how it would end, because he always says that you've got to have your ending before you start your story. But it was fairly free-form as we were going along. I would do something visually that would come back later. He'd say, "When you had Genius Jones on Anthro's shoulders? That was perfect, do that again." Or we'd talk about an idea and it would show up in the next issue. You could feel it coming together and growing. It was a combination of ideas, not just him throwing shit at me and saying "Draw this." It's really fulfilling and rewarding to be in that kind of a work relationship, particularly for me because I feel like I approach the story from a writer's perspective. I get the script and ask "What does the writer want here? What is he trying to achieve? Is what he's telling me to do the best way to get that across visually, or can I come up with a better way?" When I'm working with somebody like Brian, to know that that they appreciate that means a lot to me.
Prior to Dr. 13, Cliff had turned down a job offer for a project based off of Neil Young's Greendale
album. He followed the sleeper success of Dr. 13 (seriously, name another back-up project collected that quickly) by re-teaming with his Josie Mac counterpart, Judd Winick, for a brief run on the Green Arrow & Black Canary
ongoing.
Unbeknownst to him, Neil Young would spend the next year holding onto copies of Cliff's work in Detective Comics
, unwilling to take no for an answer.
When the project first came around, I was about to start working on
Doctor 13. I said "I'm not sure this is my thing, I've got this other book coming out that I really want to work on, so I'll have to pass." They'd find somebody else, no big deal. Six months later, after I'd finished
Doctor 13, I got another call from Karen Berger but I was already on
Green Arrow & Black Canary. So again, I had to say "No, I can't really do it." I think she called at least one more time, and each call weighed more on me because Karen's the big boss and I knew this project meant a lot to her. How many more times could I keep saying no? But after I'd finished
Green Arrow & Black Canary, I didn't have anything to do. I was waiting to see what presented itself.
Then I got the email, on Superbowl Sunday, right after the half-time show. Tom Petty had just played. I don't know if Neil was watching football, but it seemed like pretty funny timing to me. And I didn't know what to do! You can't just blow off an email from Neil Young. I got a copy of the script, and after reading it, there was something there that reminded me of a Miyazaki movie, a kind of gentle humanism. And I was interested in trying to bring that out. I called Karen the next day, Monday morning, and said yes.
For the next two years, Cliff's only job was Greendale
. Working closely with Dysart, Cliff was forced to acclimate himself to a working style unlike any that had marked his career to date. His only feedback came from co-workers and a small group of friends, and his previous experience--either in the realistic crime stylings of Human Target and Josie Mac, or the theatrical super-heroics of Green Arrow & Doctor 13--formed the barest minimum of experience for the story he was brought on to tell. After making the decision to take a stronger hand in the direction of his career, he had effectively ratcheted up the difficulty level on every portion of it.
The book was so far out of my comfort range--set in the Pacific Northwest. I think of myself as being a more urban guy, drawing Batman or Daredevil or something like that, you know? And this is about a high school girl, and it's environmental, it's political.
I had a 160 page script thrown in my lap, and I had to eat it, digest it, sit with it, and spit it back out. The only things that I could take from the album were little specific details like you would with the continuity details in super-hero work. There's the white car. She has a cat that I only show in one panel, but on the album, the cat gets shot by the FBI when they're looking for drugs in her room. That stuff needed to be in there, and there was a lot of it. I think the
Greendale album is only nine or ten songs, but when Neil performed it live, it was 22 songs. They didn't make it onto the album but they're all part of his vision of
Greendale. The story itself is clearly close to Neil's heart, and he wants it out there in as many forms as possible. I needed to respect that.
There was a logic to the story that Josh [Dysart] had written, but sometimes I'd have to call him up and ask questions like "What did you mean by that, Why did you put that in there?" And he was always eager and welcoming to talk about that kind of stuff, much more than I would have thought anybody would. I really appreciated his lack of ego. We'd start thinking about the story, we'd keep talking and I'd be able to figure out a visual solution. It happened all the time. We'd talk for twenty minutes and I'd have my answer.
The work didn't stop at phone calls—the length of the script forced Cliff to abandon the distractions (and paychecks) of cover illustrations, enforce a ritualized work schedule, and, in keeping with his commitment to veracity, learn about tractors and the constructions of backyard chicken coops. The resulting graphic novel is a testament to his own formidable skill as an artist, a story that surpasses the dated nature of its setting (Greendale takes place at the beginning of the Iraq invasion), and delivers some of the most beautiful pages of his work to date. While the two years he spent were not without creative struggles, the finished product has been met with popular acclaim. More importantly, Chiang seems satisfied with the work he's created, an accomplishment made more remarkable by his own tendency towards hyperbolic self-criticism.
The life of a freelancer doesn't allow for breaks. In Part Two, we look at where Cliff's career went next.
Images from:
Greendale, Detective Comics, Beware The Creeper, Tales of the Unexpected, Golden Age Secret Files, Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre & Human Target.Genius Jones sketch courtesy of
David Wolkin.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
