INTERVIEW: Award-winning illustrator P. Craig Russell

As part of the Eastman School of Music’s month-long
celebration of the music of composer Claude Debussy, ESM will present a free
performance of “Pelléas Redux”
Friday, October 26, at 8 p.m. at Kodak Hall in Eastman Theatre. A theatrical
presentation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s love-triangle-laden tragic play, “Pelléas & Mélisande,” featuring
music from Debussy’s operatic adaptation, the show will also include
illustrations from the comic-book adaptation of the story by P. Craig Russell. The concert will be led by ESM music-theory professor Matthew Brown, and Russell’s illustrations have been transformed into a motion comic for the event through the use of various digital techniques.

P. Craig Russell is a comic-book writer, artist, and
illustrator known for his romantic, Art Nouveau-esque
style. He has won both Harvey and Eisner awards, and is extremely well regarded for his work on “Amazing Adventures,” “Elric,” “The Sandman,” as well as his ongoing series of
comic book adaptations of operas and literature. Russell is in town visiting
Rochester for the first time for the presentation of “Pelleas Redux.” City spoke with Russell prior to his
visit about his work, the upcoming ESM collaboration, and the comic-book
world’s shift into the digital age. The following is an edited transcript of
that interview.

CITY: How did you
become interested in creating comic versions of epic operas?

P. CRAIG RUSSELL: Well, I’ve been an opera fan since I was a kid, so I was familiar with the
music. But mostly I was just looking for a good story to tell, outside of the
mainstream superhero Marvel comic sort of genre, which is where I started as a
professional. When the opportunity came up to do comics outside of the
mainstream, and with the opening up of so-called ground-level comics in the
late 70’s, it was just sort of a natural fit.

How do you choose the
particular stories?

It has to be a good story. There are a lot of great operas
that have somewhat silly stories that I don’t think would be interesting graphic
novels, so it would have to be something that has a good libretto to begin with.
Not just great music, because the music isn’t going to translate into a visual
form — certainly not a soundless visual form. So most of my operas also have
great librettos, [such as those] by Maurice Maeterlinck, Oscar Wilde, things like that. Or Wagner’s own libretto for “The
Ring of the Nibelung.”

What about “Pelléas et Mélisande,”
or Debussy in particular, interested you?

Well, that was the first one I did after “Parcifal,” and “Parcifal” had
been written for me as sort of a prose treatment by a friend of
mine, Patrick Mason. “Pelleas” was the first one I
chose, and I chose that entirely because of the libretto. I was somewhat
familiar with the music, and certainly loved Debussy, but did not know the
opera all that well. Most of what I took from it was Maeterlinck’s original
play, although I did listen to the opera and it did influence some scenes, in
how I presented it. But I just thought the dialogue between the characters was
so brilliant, so affecting, that I just jumped at the chance to do it.

The comic book
industry is collaborative by nature, but can you discuss how creating a comic
adapted from opera differs from other adaptations you’ve done, such as Oscar
Wilde’s fairy tales, or even illustrating stories written by living writers
such as Neil Gaiman?

I try to do as much as I can, be in control of as many
aspects of a piece of work as I can, whether it’s an adaptation from a play, an
opera, a short story, or a novel. I think I pretty much approach them all the
same. I’m taking a literary form and a finding visual structure, a visual way
of presenting the story. So there’s not too much difference from one to
another.

Although, one difference in adapting an opera or a play from
a novel is that in the opera or play, it’s all dialogue. There are stage
directions, but the story is told entirely with words, with dialogue between
the characters. Where in a short story or a novel, you have a lot of
descriptive writing, a lot of sections that simply describe what you’re seeing.
The author can describe a person’s internal state, what they’re thinking or
what their position in society is, which is much more difficult to do in a
play, where you have the people talk to each other. I find that a play or opera
is in a way easier to adapt because it’s all told through this dialogue and
action. The book — you just have a lot more decisions to make as to what to
leave in, what to take out. There is just a lot more sculpting going on with a
novel than with a play or an opera.

You’ve said these works were adapted from the theatrical
scripts, but you also listen to the music while you are creating the
illustrations. Can you talk a bit more about the musical composition and how
that’s taken into account?

With “Pelléas & Mélisande,”
there was a little bit I took from the music, but not much. My next one was
“Salomé,” and that was working with Oscar Wilde’s words, but I am a crazy Strauss
fan, so I was listening to the opera a lot, and that influenced my adaptation.
In a sense, it’s almost an adaptation of an adaptation, because Strauss is
doing an adaptation of the stage play.
Listening to some of his musical solutions influenced how I dramatized my
adaptation. There were certain musical sounds, like when Salomé looks into the
cistern where John the Baptist is, the music gets black; it just gets so dark.
He created the effect of taking the audience down into the cistern with this
black sound. That influenced me in a way — I actually did the same thing, I
took us down into the cistern to a point where the panel was pitch black, and
reversed the camera so we’re looking up through the grating at Salomé, as if
we’re John the Baptist in the cistern.

What sort of inspiration or visual research do you do for illustrations? For
example, do you use models, or look at the photos from the original productions
where they’re available?

I never look at original production photos. I don’t want to be influenced by
another artist’s interpretation. Of course, I’ve seen many of them in books and
such over the years — stage sets of different productions and all that — I’m
not unaware of it, but I try to do something as original as I can, I try to
have an authentic personal response to it that’s different in some way from
everything else that’s been done.

The other half of your question, about models — yes. I
rope all of my friends in sooner or later, into acting out bits and parts. I
don’t have them in costumes ever, I just sort of approximate something I want, then make the rest up as I’m drawing. But to get the
consistency of facial design and such, I’ve had friends that I’ve been using
over a 35-year period. It’s kind of like having a
photo album of them…I have friends that are aging in my comics.

How did this particular project with the Eastman School of Music get started?

Matthew Brown approached me through email, and introduced himself, and talked
about the project they were doing, was I interested in it.
I thought the project was fascinating. I haven’t seen what they’ve done yet,
but I’m looking forward to seeing this constant stream of images while the
music is being played. In Utrecht they did a concert performance of “Cavalleria Rusticana” and they
used my adaptation above the orchestra. They were projecting my illustrations.
It can be an interesting way to present it. Something new for
the audience, and a new way to approach it.

I think the way Eastman is using my pictures is much more complex than
the earlier one. It’s about a 60-page adaptation, and
I think they’re using almost every single image. I’ve had no input into the way they’re handling this, so I’m very interested to
see how it’s going to turn out. I feel confident in it because I know how much
work they’re putting into this, into the chamber score, the rehearsals, and I
know from the piece [Brown] showed me, it seems to be quite labor
intensive. They seem so intent in what they’re doing, I feel confident it’s
going to look good.

Will there by other such projects in the future, if others approach you for
theatrical pairings of music and your illustrations?

I would love there to be. I think “The Ring” is a natural, but it’s so enormous.
I think “Salomé” would be easily turned into an adaptation; it’s a shorter opera,
shorter than “Pelléas.” I’ve also done adaptations of “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci,” and I think those would both translate well.

Do you have plans to continue to adapt operatic theater into comic book form?

I have a lot of projects lined up, not operatic. I have the next several years
accounted for. But I do want to do one more. I’m not sure why, but I settled on
the number 12 years ago. I’ve done 11, that leaves
one to go.

What shifts have you seen in your work throughout your career?

It’s more of a constant evolution, where you don’t notice it from one month to
the next or one year to the next. But you look at your work from 10 years or 20
years ago and the style is different. You can look at it and say,
Well, this is what decade this is from.

What do you see happening in the future of comics, with regards to the digital
age? For example, digital versions at the same time of print releases.

If it can in any way work in such a way that artists can produce work and make
enough profits to live on, and not be killed by all of the piracy that’s going
on, that’ll be a good thing. Now, I understand that everyone who is illegally
downloading something wouldn’t necessarily buy your book, if this wasn’t available. It’s just that if there’s a chance to get
it for free, they will. So it’s hard to say how many sales you’ve lost.

It’s a new world. I’m still
doing things pretty much in the old-fashioned way with pen and pencil and
paper. There are cartoonists who just do their work digitally now, and there’s
no hard copy at all. I’m doing an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s
“The Graveyard Book” right now, and I’ve done the script and layouts for the
entire book on regular old sheets of paper, and it’s all been hand
lettered, and will be given to seven other artists who will do the finished artwork
over my layouts. But one artist, Michael Golden, who is doing the last story in
the book, is doing it entirely on a computer. He’ll just scan in those pages
that have the lettering on them, and however he does it, he’ll have done it,
but there will be no hard copy of that one story out of the entire book.

There’s a lot of excited or panicked talk, depending on where you’re coming
from, of print media disappearing over the next few decades. There’s a big
shift already in literature into eBooks. Do you think there is a threat of
comics ever not existing in the physical realm, or will their collectable nature as
art objects save them?

I couldn’t really say. I hope so. I do know in animation there are no longer any
animation cells, which is really sad. Collectors would get individual cells
from the films. Now you can get prints of them, but that physical part is
really gone. It’s not quite the same as books. I would imagine the mainstream
companies would be just fine with it being all digital.
I just did a short story for DC Comics and my new scanner isn’t compatible with
my computer, so I had to send in the original to DC in New York City — the old-fashioned way, through the mail — for them to scan it at their office, and the
editor said there were some young people who were so excited — they’d never
seen original artwork.

When I started back in the 70’s, I was working on a book for Marvel for a couple
of years which eventually was cancelled because its sales were low — the sales
were about 75,000 copies an issue. That at the time was considered low. Today
we would kill for a 75,000 print run. I think because of computer games and all
of that, the sales have dropped significantly over the decades. At the same
time it’s opened up in other directions. Major publishers are getting more into
graphic novels, and it’s going more in the direction of single volumes rather
than these single periodical pamphlets you get at the newsstand.

Would you say then that video games and new media were a greater threat to the
comics industry than comics transferring into the digital realm?

Yes, because it was happening before comics entered the digital age. I think
the general consensus is that audience found the superhero sword-and-sorcery
was more exciting and more fulfilling in the digital gaming arena than just
reading a comic book.

Would you consider doing illustrating for video games?

Yes, I think a lot of it is the subject matter I do — fantasy, sword and
sorcery and all of that. They’re all equally valid artistic
outlets, they’re all interrelated. I don’t see
it as the enemy, it’s just a natural sort of evolution.

To see more work by P. Craig Russell visit his website.