Comixology.com's Peter Jaffe recently got the chance to interview
James Turner, creator of
Rex Libris, the ongoing series published by SLG that features a superhuman librarian, the sorceress Circe, the god Thoth, and a host of other library-dwellers and demons.
Rex Libris #9 ships on November 21.
Comixology: First off, for anyone who's not familiar with Rex Libris, can you set up the premise and the story and characters?
James Turner: It's about butt kicking librarians protecting knowledge and saving human civilization from the forces of darkness. It's a mixture of comedy, action, and absurdity. Metatextual elements, like the publisher B. Barry Horst, sometimes break into the action.
The lead is Rex Libris, an immortal Latin librarian who now has a Bronx accent thanks to a device called the Cultural Transmogrifier. He's aided by Circe, the reformed sorceress, and a young woman named Hypatia, after Hypatia of Alexandria. They are all backed up by Thoth, who lives in the library basement (and occasionally orders in muffins), guarded by the sphinx. Simon, a former philosopher who was transformed into a talking telekinetic bird by CIrce (as is her wont) alternately helps and hinders Team Librarian.
It may be superfluous to mention, but it is all very tongue in cheek.
Cmxlgy: Nowadays it's very common for comic book artists to scan their pencils and do cleanup, inking, and colors or shading in photoshop. But I understand that you create Rex Libris entirely in photoshop (correct me if that is wrong!), and your work certainly has a very graphical and non-hand-drawn look to it. Can you describe your technique, and how it came about?
JT: The comic is all created in Adobe Illustrator. It's a vector based drawing program in which you lay down points, which the computer then connects together to create an image. I've been using the program for over 15 years for illustration work, so when I started
Nil I naturally set about it using the program with which I'm most familiar.
Cmxlgy: Where are the clerks and pages at Middleton Public Library? It seems like the librarians do an awful lot of dirty work. And I don't just mean the dirty work of slaying demons in the stacks.
JT: Rex mentions the reason for this in issue 6. Basically, the Middleton Public Library is built over the most powerful Ley point on the planet, and as such attracts 'interesting' (in the Confucian sense) events more than anywhere else. For example, if an alien decides to land on earth at a random location, odds are it will pick Middleton Library. Telluric energy currents in the subether draw all manner of unusual and bizarre phenomenon towards the Middleton Ley point. It's the equivalent of a gravity well for interesting events.
Pages and clerks are not trained in hand to hand combat and experienced an astonishingly high mortality rate at the Middleton branch. Due to high insurance premiums, the library is now only staffed by fully trained librarians. Sometimes pages come in after hours, but they only operate in groups and under close supervision.
Cmxlgy: Everyone who's ever worked at a public service desk at a library has had fantasies about dealing properly with the patrons, going after delinquent books with heavy weaponry, and the like. Reading Rex Libris, one can't help thinking that you must have experienced that yourself. Can you talk about your own library background? Are you a librarian yourself?
JT: I've worked in the service sector, so I understand the frustration we can all feel when dealing with 'the public', but I've never actually worked as a librarian. I just like frequenting them. You can find all sorts of interesting things randomly strolling through the aisles that you might otherwise never consider.
Cmxlgy: How did you get involved in writing comic books? Who are your influences?
JT: I decided to write a graphic novel in 2003 or so. The world was seeming particularly nuts at the time. Perhaps my personal insanity was just out of sync with the mass insanity. Anyway. I felt I had something to say about the whole thing and set about writing Nil. Quite appropriately, Nil deals with nihilism and it's fairly bleak. Rex emerged from Nil. They're polar opposites. Rex would be lighthearted and fun, while also look at the amazing accumulation of knowledge that humanity has assembled. I wanted to do something very open topic wise. The public library was the perfect choice for the setting. I live in Toronto, and we have the most widely used public library system in the world. With inter-library loan you can learn about just about anything. This allows for tangents going off in all sorts of directions.
Rex Libris fills the void of Nil, or so the underlying thinking went. I've been figuring it out as I go, and I readily admit I've not managed to pull it all together the way I might have liked, but I still have had a blast writing it.
I'd say the first five issues are less worked out in terms of detail but more structured in term of overall plot, while the latest issues are tighter in the details and looser in over all direction. This is in part because I decided to do a series of single issues after issue 5, before starting the next big arc. Book of Monsters was supposed to only be one issue. When I was writing it, I found it was simply too much fun to restrict to one issue, so I made it two. When I finished the art on the first issue, I'd had so many more silly ideas I expanded it to three issues. It would have been four if I hadn't exercised self-restraint. But expanding things like that on the fly causes problems with the bigger picture.
Cmxlgy: Do you have other projects in the works that you can tell us about?
JT: I've got a graphic novel I'm working on, but I keep having to put it aside. It's a spin off from Nil, using the two detectives demons, and it's set in Hell. I'm having lots of fun with the visuals.
Cmxlgy: What comics or graphic novels do you read?
JT: I'm not reading any ongoing series right now. I'm a bit out of the loop. The last graphic novel I picked up was a black and white Essential Fantastic Four collection. Volume 3 I think it was. Great, power packed Kirby artwork.
Cmxlgy: What are your inspirations (graphically, and story-wise) in creating Rex Libris? Whose influences might we see if we look closely?
JT: I think Kirby and Herge are the two big ones, although I'm not sure this influence is easily recognizable. Herge is very controlled and much more detailed, while Kirby has a lot more dynamism in his work. But there are elements in there.
In terms of writing, I'm not sure anymore to be honest. I had lofty ambitions when I started. I think the influence of the early Fantastic Four is still there to some degree, mixed in with absurdity and, hopefully, humour.
You might say it's inspired by the media saturated environment we live in. We absorb an awful lot of information these days. I'm just burping it back up again. Like some kind of information indigestion or something....
