By Martijn Form  Hi Vertigolovers, So did you miss me for the last few weeks? What do I have in store for you my Vertigo friends? Well, this week we will take a closer look at the new great Vertigo series called Air. I had myself a blast chatting with writer G. Willow Wilson and artist M.K. Perker about this new series. Air is a lovely strange series. It's a great mixture of fantasy and realism. The main character is Blythe, a stewardess—oh sorry that isn't the political correct term anymore is it—Blythe is a flight attendant with severe angst about flying. Well, not really the flying part, but the crashing part, really. On top of that, she finds herself being caught in a web of international terrorism, a mysterious lover with more aliases than you or I can count, and visits to countries that don't exist anymore. Sounds like fun, right? It's a great book, each time I read an issue, it brings me back when I started reading Y: the Last Man. Air is fresh and original. Above all, it's a great character-driven narrative. But the story leaves me with a lot of questions and who better to ask the writer and artist themselves. Martijn Form: When I look at your resume, you have written a lot of non-fiction articles about politics and faith. Why and how did you get interested in writing fiction in a comic format?  G. Willow Wilson: I've been working in comics in some capacity since I was nineteen, when I interned for Komikwerks.com. I started writing Cairo before I got my first serious journalistic assignment. Comics are a medium I've been interested in since I was very young. My idea of what a tragic hero should be was shaped by Wolverine, who I watched adoringly in the X-Men cartoon that aired during the early 90s. MF: Air is your first comic series. How do you like creating a comic book every month? GWW: It's like driving a freight train! Exhilarating and scary at the same time. There's very little room for error. MF: Turkish artist M.K. Perkes is new to American monthly comics. How do you feel about his handling of your scripts? GWW: MK and I worked together on Cairo, so when it came time to do Air I was more than confident in his skills as an artist. There's a stereotype about creative people being flaky—artists in particular. He's the opposite. He's one of the most committed people I've ever met. Working with him is great. MF: Air is a piece of fiction, with elements of fantasy and mysticism. But it's also heavily based on reality. What made you interested in mixing those elements into a narrative? What's your inspiration for that? GWW: It's kind of how I see the world. To me the line between provable and theoretical is very blurry. I think symbols and stories carry a tremendous amount of real power. I actually have to make an effort to keep a story entirely “reality-based”. So to me, Air has a very natural feel to it. MF: In the first issue of Air, even on the first page, you made a reverence to The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, which was a very controversial book for believers of the Islam. You yourself being a Muslimah, I wondered why you chose to put that reverence in there? GWW: I wanted to use that very powerful symbol—two people falling out of a plane—and turn it on its head. Why should skeptics have all the fun? There's room for surrealism in a religious narrative. MF: I have to tell you that something has keeping me up at night: the snake with wings in issue 2 and 3. I speculated in this column about that image, speculating that the snake could be the mythological creature Iaculus, or that it has something to do with Caduceus, the wand of Hermes. Can you shed some light on this image? GWW: You're in the right neighborhood philosophically but not geographically. That's all I'll say. MF: Hmmm, seems like I have to get back to my mythology books tonight.  The comic business is pretty much male dominated. How does being a woman, and therefore an outsider in the industry, resonate in your writing? GWW: Usually I don't notice it much. But I'm noticing it more with Air than I did with Cairo or Outsiders or Vixen. Air has a lot more classically feminine elements, some of which don't seem to sit well with male readers. Though the people who make and read comics are overwhelmingly liberal, the medium itself is pretty conservative—it's about reworking the same characters and the same tropes over and over. Any time you stray from that formula, whether you're a man or a woman, you get into gambler's territory. But that's part of the fun. It's a challenge to me as a writer, not as a pair of X chromosomes. MF: I myself am scared of flying, just like your main character Blythe, and it doesn't help reading about it. That's especially true when you deal with terrorism in air travel as you do in your comic. You on the other hand, travel a lot between your home country, the U.S., and your other home country, Egypt. Do you ever worry? GWW: Nah. You're more likely to be killed by lightning than by a hijacker. To me flying is like riding a bus, only in the sky. Now that most airlines refuse to feed you, entertain you or even take notice of your existence, that's even more true. MF: To end on a lighter note, which airport does Blythe like the best for a six-hour flight delay? GWW: Now that is an interesting question. Maybe Dubai? They've got a really swank, modern airport. But Schiphol, where Blythe is based, is my personal favorite. They've got a mini-art museum, lounge chairs, and Dutch pancakes. Really, what else could you want? MF: Yeah Dutch pancakes are great. And me being Dutch I know all about them. Schiphol isn't bad for an airport, but the city of Amsterdam is much better. Speaking of Amsterdam, to see my hometown in a comic like Air is loads of fun for me. So thank you for making my day with that. G. Willow Wilson whetted my appetite for more inside info on Air, so I contacted M.K. Perker with some more questions, and here are his responses.  MF: This is your first ongoing monthly comic series. How does it differ from working on a OGN like Cairo? M. K. Perker: I always wanted to do a monthly book because you see the results every month. Artwork looks different on a printed page. You can see the end product with its colors and letters. So you can rearrange your approach to the book after seeing it in print, which is the best way to improve your work. I work very disciplined so I didn't have any deadline-wise difference doing Cairo, I was still doing 20 pages on a monthly basis. MF: What was it that you were most looking forward to by getting into comics? MKP: I was 17 years old when I started working as a professional artist at a weekly comic magazine. The tradition in Europe is to do short stories or short installments of a long story in weekly or monthly comic magazines, which actually are anthologies. When I started I was more into Franco-Belgian comics, which were mostly humorous books like Asterix, Lucky Luke and Tintin. Later I discovered artists like Moebius, Serpieri, Hugo Pratt, Nicholas De Crecy. But they, except Serpieri, also had some cartoony/exaggerated style, which was the gateway for me to get into more realistic comics. Then I discovered Moebius' realistic style and it opened a huge door for me. American comics came later on but interestingly I got into American comics through British artists like Dave Mc Kean, Brian Bolland, whom I thought were Americans. But then again, at the time I thought R.E.M and Stanley Kubrick were British. Anyway, I have always been looking for something with more detail and personal voice, I think. But this broad interest really helped me to have the versatility but still with discipline to keep the consistency while working in different styles. MF: How much research did you have to do for Air. The story seems to hit every country on the planet earth? MKP: I do quite a research. But like many artists I have a good memory and a visual library in my mind that is also helpful. MF: What's a typical day for you? When do you start? MKP: I start working very early in the morning. And keep working all day. Most of the times I go back to the things that I had drawn earlier and make corrections if I see something bothering me that I didn't see before. Because while you're focused on a panel you might miss something that you don't like and if you go back to it after being distant from it, you might find it. While I'm penciling I follow the pages in order because I think it's the best way. But while inking I jump from page to page, sometimes panel to panel to keep the quality of the inking balanced. MF: Besides G. Willow Wilson's scripts, are there any other inspirations you use to handle the characters in Air? MKP: Yes there are many. Movies are always a big inspiration. I think that characters should act like actors with real facial expressions and body language. And of course coffee and cigarettes. MF: You do your own inking. Does this help you better convey what you want with your art? MKP: I'm coming from the European tradition where an artist pencils and inks. And to me this is the way it should be. But I understand why in America it became a system that someone pencils and another one inks. Because of the deadlines. In Europe an artist produces a graphic novel of 48-64 pages a year. Sometimes they do it every 2 years or sometimes more. Here you're doing 22 pages every month. But still, I prefer to ink it myself. I'm also coloring my covers.  MF: What do you enjoy about working with Willow Wilson? MKP: I like Willow as a writer and I would have been her reader even if I was not working with her. There's a respect she creates by being not only a good writer but also a smart one. Also the most fun part of working with her is that being a smart person she is always open to good ideas coming from you. I'm not talking about any contribution to the story line because I had none, but a different visual take on what she wrote. If you have a good idea she recognizes and values it. MF: You already worked with G. Willow Wilson on the OGN Cairo. This is a monthly comic instead of a one-shot. What are the similarities and differences working on those books? MKP: I'm more nervous working on Air because you have to sustain a certain amount of readership. The success of a monthly book comes mostly from its sales. The sales of a graphic novel is important too, but because it's evaluated in a long period of time the success of it is usually based on the quality of the book. With a monthly book, the book might not sell well and be rediscovered later on because it originally was good, but it could be too late. I think Loveless is a good example to this condition, it was one of the greatest books and it is going to be rediscovered. MF: Both Air and Cairo can be described as magic realism, blending fact and fantasy into one narrative. Are there any other genres you love to do for a comic series? MKP: I'd like to do a super-hero book. I hope the DC and Marvel editors will read this column, because I think it would be great to see M.K. Perker work for a superhero title. I think his style would fit very well with a series like Action Comics. Well that's it for this week. Stay tuned for next week's episode. It will be a very special one, and one that will surely get me nominated for a Pulitzer. Thanks again to G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker. I will leave you with some layouts and final inked pages for you to study. I think the layouts are some of the best I have ever seen. See you next week.   |
