David Mack Speaks on Kabuki
David Mack is considered by some to be a creative dynamo in the comics industry, unleashing ground breaking work on books such as Daredevil and his creator owned book, Kabuki. With over twelve years spent professionally in the comic industry and more graphic novels than you can count, Mack has grown a large fan base and garnered acclaim from all parts of the world. Mack’s innovative take on bringing together storytelling, drawing, painting and other artistic techniques in the comics medium and constantly exploring new areas. In 2004, along with Brian Michael Bendis, he formed the creator owned Icon imprint at Marvel comics, bringing over his long running Kabuki title for its latest series, The Alchemy.
MIKE STORNIOLO: Who are some of your inspirations from comics, literature, fine art, movies?
DAVID MACK: When I was a kid, it was really Frank Miller that made me see so much potential in the role of the storyteller in comics. I read my first Daredevil comic when I was 9 and I was overwhelmed. By 12 years old, I really got a sense of all the things Miller was using to tell the story and it made me want to do the same thing. From Miller, I learned about Will Eisner. And also Steranko really made an impact on me as a kid. By 20 years old, I had become great friends with Brian Michael Bendis, Andy Lee and Mike Oeming. We were all working on our art and stories and really helped to inspire and learn from each other in our early formative years.
But way before that, it was my mother’s art work that inspired me as a kid. She was a first grade teacher, and was very encouraging of my work from my earliest memories. She always had paper and pens and supplies for me to write and draw and construct things with. So I have always been writing and drawing and making things as long as I can remember being alive. There is a story about this in #4 issue of Kabuki: The Alchemy. A completely factual autobiographical story about how I began my work as a kid, from the teachings of my mother.
As far as literature, the Bible was my earliest experience, as well as some classics. And that made a big impact on me as a child. So there are some biblical and Shakespearean themes that run through my work. I didn’t have a TV until I was an adult. Nor did I have much exposure to films as a kid. So my learning from film came a bit later. And when it did, I dove into it, and got my own video camera to make my own movies with friends.
MS: Tell us a little about the upcoming Art of David Mack hardcover.
DM: This book is scheduled for 2006 from Marvel’s ICON imprint that Kabuki is published through. The Art of David Mack (Vol. 1 The Complete Kabuki covers); it is an oversized hardcover. The art book will include every single Kabuki cover ever published (over 100), oversized and free from any cover type or logos, as well as my covers from Daredevil and Alias, my covers from Ruule: Ganglords of Chinatown, and additional cover paintings. It will include sketches of the covers and some step-by-step photos of the art process, as well as commentary by me and Brian Michael Bendis.
It will have 12 years of Kabuki covers, I’ve done about 20 Daredevil covers, and thirty something Alias covers, and the book will have lots of extras and sketches and discussion of my approaches and step by step to the work. I plan for it to be the first volume in a sequence of art books of mine. For more information on the Art of David Mack book go to davidmackguide.com.
MS: So for those not reading it, but that might be interested, what’s the low-down on Kabuki: The Alchemy? And for that matter, maybe, the entire Kabuki saga?
DM: The current Kabuki series from Marvel Comics, Kabuki: The Alchemy, is a brand new era in Kabuki's life. It is a great place for new readers to start because it is a brand new start for Kabuki that is very much its own story, not dependant on previous stories. You don't need to read the past to understand the primary thrust of the new story. But if you do, you will love the contrast and the oblique and subtle hints at her past. And you will see the fruition of many of the seeds planted in previous issues! Seeds that you didn't know were seeds, but now you will see them blossom into something spectacular and mind-blowing.
This era in Kabuki’s life is its own story and it is not going to recap anything from the previous stories. I've made sure that all six Kabuki volumes are in print and available in paperback and hardcover collections. So, I hope readers will use this as an opportunity to read the early Kabuki collections that have come before in preparation for this new series. But if they do not, they will still be able to begin with this story.
The new series is specifically designed to be Kabuki’s new life. And it is essentially an instruction manual on creating a NEW life, creating the life of YOUR OWN PERSONAL DREAMS AND INTERESTS that should be practical and applicable to anyone who reads it. It is a recipe and blueprint for creating your own reality, your own career, and your own fresh start. It is a spell for creating your own magic. Taking the baggage of your life and turning it into something positive and useful; turning your garbage into gold.
For readers who aren't familiar with Kabuki, here is a rundown of the series and the concept:
The first Kabuki story begins with the character called Kabuki being an operative for a government agency in Japan called the Noh. This agency polices the interdependence between the worlds of organized crime and politics and business in Japan. They are also a part of the media and each of the Noh is a sort of pop culture icon with a mask and clothing that is a variation on a form of Japanese traditional theatre. Kabuki has some personal issues stemming from the scars on her face, and she can only relate to the world through the security of her mask. The mystery of her scars unfolds as her personal issues with the death of her mother send her in a path of action that conflicts with the powers that she serves.
It is a mix of Japanese historical mythology, political intrigue, corporate espionage, and familial duty wrapped up in the retelling of the Japanese Ghost story. It is also a retelling of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In that each of the characters in Kabuki corresponds to iconographic characters in that book and to pieces on the chessboard. Both stories are about the pawn’s journey to queen, or a child’s journey to an adult or evolved consciousness. Just as that book was a social commentary in the guise of a children’s book, Kabuki has its own themes that operate on several levels.
The story evolves as the character does in each of the succeeding volumes. Kabuki: Metamorphosis is described as this: “In an institution for renegade government agents, a horribly scarred woman faces a psychological showdown with her interrogating analyst, meets the other “defective” inmates, discovers the nature of identity, quantum physics, time, and the meaning of life. But can she escape her captors before her former comrades track her down to silence her?”
Metamorphosis is the volume that The Alchemy continues from and the paperback collection has just seen a new printing and from Image Comics. It is 288 pages on improved paper. If you like The Alchemy, I highly recommend that you get Metamorphosis. It is probably the best collected example of my work in comics.
MS: Any further Kabuki work planned once The Alchemy wraps up?
DM: I’ll continue to write Kabuki, but I like to do other projects in between each Kabuki volume. There will be a series for each of the Noh characters that gives their own story and origin like Kabuki has in the first volume.
MS: How about more Marvel work lined up?
DM: I plan to quite a bit of writing for Marvel after this Kabuki series comes to a close. I can’t discuss details at the moment, but it is something I’m very much looking forward to. I love writing for other artists. Writing Daredevil with Joe Quesada on art was an incredibly exciting adventure. And I’m looking forward to that kind of collaboration on a Marvel character again.
MS: What was the process of creating a story as massive as Kabuki like? The concept, the fine-tuning, the development of it?
DM: Kabuki was my answer to my decision to do comic books. So perhaps I should start by explaining why I chose to do comics. All my life I had made things; stories, sculptures, paintings, drawings. And I had great passion for learning and doing. I love everything, and wasn’t really interested in specializing. At a certain point in high school teachers like you to fit your interests and passions into a box that you can at least major in, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of only doing one thing to the exclusion of others. When I was sixteen I was applying for a university scholarship for art. I teacher suggested that I put together a portfolio showing ten different media that I worked in. I had photography, sculpture, oil painting, watercolor, charcoal, etc. For the tenth piece I decided that I really wanted to do something that dealt with the nature of time and sequence. I loved film, and I loved books, and the personal nature of books, and I also loved to read comic books. So I decided that for the tenth example of my work that I would make a comic. And I did. I wrote and illustrated and lettered a 55 page book for my scholarship submission. And in the process of doing that, I realized that the medium of comic books are a format that I could integrate all other mediums into. And I realized that comics were the medium I could work in, because they had no limitations, and they included and encompassed aspects of every other medium.
My work on Kabuki Began in January of 1993 when I was twenty years old; I would begin publishing Kabuki in 1994. Having decided in high school at 16 years old that I would work in the medium of comics and graphic novels, and having worked professionally for a couple years to learn the craft since the age of 18, I decided that I wanted to create a comic book in which I could incorporate all of my personal philosophies, my passion for learning, and integrate my everyday personal experiences. I loved autobiographical comics, but I was not yet comfortable with that idea. I wanted to tell personal truths but at a distance, through the unselfconscious comfort of a veil. But I did not want to fall into the trap of making the main character an idealized version of myself. So I decided that I would make all of the surface details very opposite, and that way the universal truths could shine through, and I could tell the story through metaphor. This way, instead of reading the story and seeing me, readers could find their own personal relation to the story and see themselves.
So I made the main character the opposite gender. I set the story in a different part of the world, with a different language, different history, and different culture. I was in university at the time, and I was taking the Japanese language, and learning Japanese history and mythology in my classes and in my own travels. So I used that as a framework for the story. The structure of the story is the traditional structure and metaphors of the traditional Japanese Ghost Story that is the subject of many of the Japanese Kabuki plays.
Much of the first Kabuki story is me as a 21-22 year old dealing with the death of my mother, just as Kabuki is coming to terms with the relationship and death of her mother in the story.
I knew the structure that the story would follow. So I had a skeletal outline of some of the major points very early on. And through the process of working on it, the rest came alive for me. When I was working on Kabuki: Circle of Blood, I knew the main structure of most of the other books up through Metamorphosis. But the real life of the story occurred in the process. And when I was doing Kabuki: Metamorphosis, most of the high points for Kabuki: The Alchemy occurred to me and I made notes for it then and also outlined my ideas for the next few Kabuki stories.
MS: Any work that you’d love to get a chance to do in your career?
DM: I intend to publish some children’s books, write some novels, write and direct film, and make a documentary. I’ll write books in collaboration with other artists. And I have several other creator owned ideas simmering. I love to write, and I love to draw and paint and tell stories visually, so I am really enjoying comics. I also intend to do children’s books, work in film, and to write novels without images, and also continue doing large paintings outside of the books. I love the “act” of making things; the process of it. I see the work as a verb and not a noun; an action and not a subject. So my goals have been to continue in that action. And with each and every project, I like to grow and evolve and break new ground and learn things that I have not tried before. I feel like I’m in my embryonic stage of my career, and I’m enjoying the growth of it. The more I do, the wider the possibilities seem to be. And I like that.
The more goals that I accomplish, the more goals seem to spring up in front of me, and I’m loving working in that space of continual growth and evolution. As far as Kabuki is concerned, I have many more Kabuki stories written to follow the current Alchemy storyline. And I have some other creator owned projects. One is an autobiographical comic that I’ve been working on tentatively titled “Self Portrait”.
MS: Any creators that you’d like to collaborate with?
DM: I would love to work with Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman. Artist I’d like to see draw stories I write: Alex Maleev, Mike Oeming, Andy Lee, Frank Quitely, Paul Pope, and Josh Middleton. Brian Bendis and I intend to collaborate again.
MS: It’s over a year into it Marvel’s ICON imprint already, how has that situation been working out for you so far?
DM: It has exceeded all of our expectations. Everyone involved in the transition has been great to work with. And Bendis, Oeming and I are very grateful to our readers. Both the new ones and those that have been with us from the beginning.
MS: With the recent revelation of Echo being the one behind the Ronin mask in New Avengers, let’s talk about that real quick. How did that come to be? Any input on your part?
DM: Brian was nice enough to call ahead of time and let me know he wanted to do it. He certainly didn’t have to tell me. But it was nice that he did. And I have complete trust in his abilities. No input from me on any of it.
MS: One of the first things people will notice when they read your work is the vast diversity of styles that you implore throughout the various books; penciling, painting, textures? How did you incorporate all of these arts into comics?
DM: Each of the stories has a different atmosphere to it, so I want the art to reflect that. When doing a book, I consider myself a writer first. Story is the king. So it makes sense to me to use whatever visual look will best support and communicate that particular story. The same with storytelling rhythm and pace and format, and other graphic narrative forms and formats. I will choose a different medium or range of mediums or pace or rhythm as just another tool of the writing. The same way I choose different words or sentence structures for the dialogue. As a writer of a graphic novel or graphic medium, the many possible nuances of the artwork and visuals are another range of tools with which to convey the story.
MS: Was your art self-taught or did you attend art-school?
DM: I didn’t attend a specialized art school. I did attend a university for 5 years. I received a BFA in Graphic Design and a minor in English. So I used that as an opportunity to drink deeply of everything the university offered. And I was able to apply that into my work and ultimately enrich my stories and art by the diversity of knowledge and resources that the university made available to me. Still, ultimately, you are self taught. You only get out of any school what you put into it. And the same is true of your work. Nothing makes you a good storyteller more than actually telling stories. You just do it. The more you do it, the more skill you cultivate. You don’t become a better storyteller just by thinking about it or dreaming about it or reading about it or talking about it, or by going to school for it. All of that may be helpful, but you also have to really do it. You have to start it, and you have to finish it, and then you have to get it to your readers. And you have to make that a regular and rhythmic part of your life. Not a sporadic thing, but a constant way of life.
MS: You’ve written and drawn more than your fair share of comics over the years, is their any one job, writing or drawing, that you prefer over the other?
DM: The entire point of doing graphic novels for me, is that they are a complete integration of the writing and the art. The point of them for me is that the writing and the art of a book are indistinguishable from one another. If done right, they become the same thing. It would be very difficult for me to separate where one ends and the other begins. I love comics because I love the act of integration. I’m most happy when I am able to integrate art and action in my life.
MS: Comics have changed tremendously since the older days, and continue to change with every new day. How do you see comics changing over the next few years?
DM: I see more and more different kinds of comics becoming available, and a growing readership for all of those different kinds of books which I find very encouraging.
MS: And closing things out is there anything else you want to mention?
DM: For additionally information about my work there is a great fan site called davidmackguide.com. It is a vastly extensive site. It has all of my work on it, and you can preview the Kabuki books on it as well as find news and advance info that is updated EVERY WEEKDAY. You can also check out my own site which is davidmack.com.
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