Over on City Weekly‘s website today you can find an interview on Gavin’s Underground with the team of Steve Lieber and Jeff Parker, creators of the new comic Underground. The duo will be coming to Dr. Volt’s in SLC this Saturday for a signing and chat, but you can learn about their careers and thoughts on comics before you go.
Gavin’s Underground interview with Steve Lieber & Jeff Parker
Gavin: What was the big breaking point for your career in comics?
Steve: Definitely Whiteout. I’d been working in comics professionally for six or seven years, but nothing I’d drawn had really clicked with readers. My skills weren’t in tune with most of the projects I’d been working on.
Gavin: How was it for you working on the Whiteout series when it first hit?
Steve: It was a dream project. I loved the story, the setting, and the character, and I got to control the look of it. Most comics from big publishers are done in a sort of assembly line, where the art gets handed off from one artist to another to get it done. Not this book. Every mark on the page was mine- my virtues, my quirks, my faults.
Gavin: The most recent series you’ve been working on has been Agents Of Atlas. How did that opportunity come about, and what’s it been like working on such an interesting title?
Jeff: Mark Paniccia at Marvel first asked if I could pitch the Secret Avengers from What If #9 because he had a hunch that we could do something cool with it. It took a while, but it got approved and Leonard Kirk came on as the artist. Not many people read that miniseries, but those who did were loud about it- it really stuck with them. The good buzz kept building and finally the set up of Dark Reign gave us a natural entry point for a new series. Carlo Pagulayan and Gabriel Hardman both came on as our main artists and suddenly the book took on all kinds of gravity. I know a lot of artists who have Atlas on their pull list because they have to see what these guys will draw next. I try of course to push the stories into scenarios that appeal to me as an artist so they’ll enjoy it. Atlas is an odd balance. On one hand it should feel comfortable and hit your nostalgia buttons, but at the same time it’s all about subverting expectations. I want the readers to not feel like they know where things are going. That’s established in the first series when instead of defeating the Yellow Claw and his empire, Jimmy Woo decides to take charge of it. From that point you should know that you’re getting on a ride without a familiar map.
