David Mack is the award-winning creator, author and artist of KABUKI published by Image Comics, and the writer and artist of Daredevil (one of the top ten best selling comics in the United States) from Marvel Comics. He is never without his sketchpad
You maintain a grueling convention schedule, touring the country and connecting with your fans. What is it that draws you to such face to face interactions
I spend so much time in my own world (and the world of the characters) writing & drawing, agonizing over every detail of the storytelling, the experiments of it, the philosophy of it, trying to craft the story just right… that I think it is good for me to step out of that world and hear what the readers get out of it. That kind of face to face reaction, lets you see how each reader relates to the story, what they get out of it, how each of them connect to things differently or interpret things in their own way… I find that fascinating. And with Kabuki being my creator-owned project, book store signings & conventions are a great way to introduce the books to completely new readers, as well as connect with the current readers. Often, I find that readers have something they want to tell you about how the books have related to them personally, in ways that I could never have imagined, and I enjoy that, especially if they are able to get something useful from it.
What’s next for you?
There are a few different projects cooking with me. The most recent Kabuki collection: The Alchemy has been collected in hardcover and paperback with an introduction by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, and a 320 pg. artbook of my work called Reflections has just been released in hardcover. My adaptation of Sci-Fi author Philip K. Dick has just been released in hardcover from Marvel.
Now I’m working on a new Daredevil project that I am co-writing with Brian Michael Bendis. I’ll be doing some art on this, and so will Alex Maleev, but the majority of the art is by Bill Sienkiewicz & Klaus Jansen. So all are creators who have spent a large chunk of our career on Daredevil, are jamming together on this.
I have a new creator-owned project that I doing with Brian Michael Bendis. And a non-fiction creator-owned project that I am writing and drawing. And I have a few more children’s books that are in the works, even a sequel to The Shy Creatures. And the new issue (#4) of my current series DREAM LOGIC at Marvel’s ICON imprint will be out soon. Dream Logic includes short stories and a variety of other things.
And in just the last week, a strange and unique little collaboration with Neil Gaiman has materialized.
Your style (watercolour, painterly, patterned, colour saturated) is instantly recognizable and unique in the comics world. How did you develop it?
Well really, any of the visual styles that I’ve developed in my books have begun as a kind of problem solving of trying to create a look, or storytelling style that fits that particular volume or story. I think of the art and layout and visual atmosphere as another tool of the writing, the storytelling. So I like to have each volume have its own look, contrasting the previous story in story tone and visual tone. I want the visual tone to underscore the theme of the story.
In the first Kabuki volume, it was a kind of crime story and I used a stark black and white art style. So in the next Kabuki volume, I wanted to contrast that look as much as possible, and I used watercolor, and collage, and more organic and toned ways of drawing and rendering.
In some of the other volumes, especially The Alchemy, I’ll try to create a different style or visual atmosphere for each chapter and sometimes each scene in the chapter to underscore the them of that particular sequence. So in a way, it is all kind of problem solving and trial and error, but it stems from the vibe that I get from that particular story.
The Kabuki books, are in a way my laboratory for figuring out different visual approaches just as they are my playground as a writer for processing and trying to make sense of life as I experience it.
Every time we’ve hung out, you’ve had your ink and sketchpad out. Would you say you’d addicted to drawing from life?
Yes, that is probably accurate. I do it all the time. Drawing from life is probably my favorite kind of visual expression. It is probably the most fun, in a whimsical sense, without that much conscious analytical baggage attached to it.
Most of my work-time is spent in storytelling on a book, considering all the visual information in service to a story, and how each image connects to the other for the good of the greater whole, and then finessing and editing that until it takes a much larger shape in service of the story and characters. And most of this is done alone.
But for just plain fun, drawing from life lets me have some kind of interaction with other humans, in real time, and draw very quickly without worrying how that image relates to anything else. It is just being present in that moment.
And drawing from life, and quickly, does have the added benefit of forcing you to figure out what information to leave out without thinking about it too much. It is a very direct and social way for me to enjoy making images, and I just give myself permission to not worry about the end result, or about this being some part of a story or a project, so it is a very liberating experience. And you can learn so much from those kind of playful experiments that you can also apply in storytelling work later.
Tell me about the genesis of Kabuki
I did the first volume of Kabuki when I was in college. I began it when I was 20 years old, and I turned in the first volume as my senior thesis in Literature. I was a big fan of autobiographical comic books. Like Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, R. Crumb, Joe Matt’s Peepshow, and Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo. And I wanted to create a book that I could use as my playground/laboratory for telling personal stories and figuring things out. But I did not feel un-self-conscious enough to make a fully autobiographical comic book at that time. I was so young, that I did not even feel fully-formed as a human yet, and felt very un-objective about how to tell that kind of story. I felt that I needed a kind of veil through which to tell personal stories. I also did not want to fall into a trap of making a character that was an idealized or self-consciously false version of myself. As Shakespeare said “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth”. As a solution, I decided that I would make the protagonist a different gender, set the story in a different part of the world, with a different set of archetypes and mythology, and then I could tell personal stories, that perhaps would be universal enough that people could look at the characters and perhaps see themselves instead of seeing me. This gave me a kind of license to work out some things without being to conscious or self-conscious about them.
I was taking the Japanese language at the time in college, and Japanese History and Mythology, and traveling, so that gave me a bit of a structure and mythology to use as a skeleton for the story. Inside the structure of that mythology I found myself working out personal things that I was going through, such as the death of my mother at the time, among other things.
Much of the Kabuki story uses the structure of the Japanese Ghost Story, which is a main theme of the traditional Kabuki plays. Inside that structure I found a liberty to process my own personal challenges, many of them subconsciously at the time.
See more of David Mack’s work at http://www.davidmack.net/
Words by Molly Crabapple
