IPOD
RADIO
Guy Davis
By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 23, 2005
Guy Davis is best known to the members of SuicideGirls as the artist behind Sandman Mystery Theatre. But the true punk elite (Don’t say out loud who you are, that wouldn’t be cool) know him as the co-creator of Honour Among Punks. That book was a seminal comic book story about Baker Street, the center of England's punk movement in a London.
But since Sandman Mystery Theatre ended, Guy Davis hasn’t slowed down one bit. His most recent works have been illustrating B.P.R.D. miniseries for Mike Mignola and Dark Horse. These miniseries tell the story of the Abe Sapien-led group that Hellboy works for. The latest one has just been collected into a trade called B.P.R.D.: A Plague of Frogs and it reveals the origin of Abe Sapien.
Buy the trade paperback of B.P.R.D.: A Plague of Frogs
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Guy Davis: I just finished penciling the second issue to the next BPRD miniseries, “The Black Flame”. No rest for me!
DRE:
It’s interesting to see you do superhero type characters like B.P.R.D. You haven’t done a lot of them.
GD:
I did some fill-ins on Batman and things like that but it was never really a genre I was into. I would take jobs doing the artwork on fill-ins because it’s paying work but it wasn’t something I ever set out to do. I also don’t feel that B.P.R.D. is really superhero book. I guess it’s got the larger than life characters but I feel like it’s got more of a pulp feel I like to it.
DRE:
How did B.P.R.D. come to you in the first place?
GD:
I’ve known [B.P.R.D. creator] Mike Mignola for a while. I was just talking to him one day and he had mentioned they wanted to spin it off into its own series. He offered it to me and I was happy to do it. I love his work and the characters.
DRE:
Have you read Hellboy from the beginning?
GD:
I’ve been a fan of Mike’s since even before Hellboy, with Corum and his other early comics. I’ve always loved his style and storytelling.
DRE:
You and Mike started in comics around the same time.
GD:
Yeah but I had heard of his stuff before I got going. I was doing a lot of small press with the 80’s black and white boom.
DRE:
You and Mike are so well respected in the industry.
GD:
No one hates Mike’s art. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who did. He’s got the best imagination and design sense out there.
DRE:
Do you get to do your interpretations of the B.P.R.D. characters?
GD:
Pretty much. Mike doesn’t want me to be a clone of his style and I don’t think I am. He has certain specific things he wants for the characters, like the stripes on Abe Sapien’s head. But then it’s open to how I interpret it into my art style. They’ve given me lots of freedom. Mike does go over everything and tells me things that would work better. He’s always right [laughs]. Working with him has been a joy, the same goes for working with [B.P.R.D. writer] John Arcudi on the new series, everything has been going really smoothly.
DRE:
It seems that you two see Abe as a guy who knows what to do in most satiations.
GD:
Yes but he’s very reserved with that calmness about him. When the situation arises he just takes care of it, but there is no hidden anger in him. I mean he’s not a character that only reacts when he’s cornered.
DRE:
Are you able to make the characters and story relevant for yourself or is it just having fun with the story?
GD:
A little bit of both. I put my own efforts into it. First and foremost I want to be proud of what I am doing with it then I want Mike to be proud of what I’ve done. But that all happens within the course of doing it which comes from doing comics for years. If you over think nothing gets done or it comes out too forced and stiff. When I started B.P.R.D. I was under a lot of pressure because I didn’t want to fuck it up. But the more I do the more comfortable I get.
DRE:
Have you gotten to draw Hellboy yet?
GD:
Hellboy isn’t in B.P.R.D, so I don’t get to draw him very much. I did a cover with Hellboy on it when Wizard Magazine did a special Hellboy/B.P.R.D. promo comic.
DRE:
You started doing B.P.R.D. before the Hellboy movie was out, so what did you think of the movie?
GD:
I liked it a lot. It had a lot of the feel of the comic and became its own thing too.
DRE:
Do you get a full script from John Arcudi for B.P.R.D.?
GD:
Yeah pretty much. He talks with Mike and they go over the storyline. Then John will put together the script and give it to me to start layouts on before penciling. His scripts have full dialogue, but they are still open so I can break them down and layout the page, if there something specific he has in mind for a scene he’ll script it out completely.
DRE:
What’s the next B.P.R.D. miniseries about?
GD:
It’s called The Black Flame. It continues on after The Dead and in it the B.P.R.D. guys have a problem with the frog monsters and we introduce a villain that had never been seen before but has been heard of in the B.P.R.D. world. That’s all I can hint at.
DRE:
One of the reasons I was able to get this on SuicideGirls is because of Honor Among Punks.
GD:
Ah from all those years ago.
DRE:
I thought ibooks reprinting of it came out great.
GD:
Yeah the scans of the pages were really crisp. I was surprised because they had to do that from the old print comic. I didn’t have a lot of the original art left. I was happy they were able to keep the cost low too.
Since the book ends on a cliffhanger I got some people writing me and asking when it was going to end [laughs]. I write them saying it will end sometime but I have other stuff to do first. I always planned to finish off the story of Baker Street.
DRE:
Do you think you and Gary Reed will ever finish it?
GD:
I’m working on B.P.R.D. full time now along with my creator owned series called The Marquis and some other stuff, so once that’s done I’ll probably go back and finish Baker Street. We only had maybe another ten issues to go.
DRE:
Were you a punk?
GD:
Yeah but now my hair is kind of gone and so are my cheekbones but that was me back then around 1988 or so.
DRE:
Were you in a band?
GD:
I was never in a band.
DRE:
That’s a surprise!
GD:
I was one of the few punks that didn’t have their own band. I was the guy doing the flyer art and comics.
DRE:
Was there a big scene where you grew up in Michigan?
GD:
It wasn’t huge but it was kind of what I portrayed in the comic, just not the murder mystery part. There was a group of friends who’d hang around and meet at different clubs, watch out for each other.
I’m out of touch so I don’t even know what punk is now.
DRE:
What were the bands you were into?
GD:
I liked Vice Squad, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Crass and some local bands I can’t even remember the names of. Sometimes at comic conventions I will meet some guy I used to hang out with and I don’t even recognize him. “When did you get old?”
DRE:
It would be better if you never seen them again.
GD:
That’s right because it just makes me feel old.
DRE:
When did punk end for you?
GD:
I probably started getting out of it in 1993 or 94. I just got tired of scraping by and living hand to mouth. It was fun for a while but the older you get the more fed up you are with that kind of shit.
DRE:
You were fed up with the establishment AND being a punk.
GD:
That’s right, I was fed up with the establishment and living like shit. But I still have good memories of bad times.
DRE:
Do you keep in touch with anyone back then?
GD:
Naw, like I said I just bump into them sometimes. I’m not even sure what a lot of them ended up doing.
DRE:
How long did you draw Sandman Mystery Theatre for?
GD:
It lasted for about 75 issues and I think I did just under 50 issues of it.
DRE:
How did that come to you?
GD:
Matt Wagner was a fan of Baker Street and wanted to collaborate on something of DC. He wanted me to go through a bunch of old DC characters and pick out some I thought would be fun for him to revamp for Vertigo. I wanted something that had an old pulp feel like the Golden Age Sandman. That was one I didn’t think they would want to do because of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. But Matt figured out that that would be the hook and that’s why I think he pitched it to DC.
DRE:
Has anyone talked about bringing that Sandman back?
GD:
Not that I hear. They just now started collecting the issues into trade paperbacks.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Guy Davis is best known to the members of SuicideGirls as the artist behind Sandman Mystery Theatre. But the true punk elite (Don’t say out loud who you are, that wouldn’t be cool) know him as the co-creator of Honour Among Punks. That book was a seminal comic book story about Baker Street, the center of England's punk movement in a London.
But since Sandman Mystery Theatre ended, Guy Davis hasn’t slowed down one bit. His most recent works have been illustrating B.P.R.D. miniseries for Mike Mignola and Dark Horse. These miniseries tell the story of the Abe Sapien-led group that Hellboy works for. The latest one has just been collected into a trade called B.P.R.D.: A Plague of Frogs and it reveals the origin of Abe Sapien.
Buy the trade paperback of B.P.R.D.: A Plague of Frogs
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you working on today?
Guy Davis: I just finished penciling the second issue to the next BPRD miniseries, “The Black Flame”. No rest for me!
DRE:
It’s interesting to see you do superhero type characters like B.P.R.D. You haven’t done a lot of them.
GD:
I did some fill-ins on Batman and things like that but it was never really a genre I was into. I would take jobs doing the artwork on fill-ins because it’s paying work but it wasn’t something I ever set out to do. I also don’t feel that B.P.R.D. is really superhero book. I guess it’s got the larger than life characters but I feel like it’s got more of a pulp feel I like to it.
DRE:
How did B.P.R.D. come to you in the first place?
GD:
I’ve known [B.P.R.D. creator] Mike Mignola for a while. I was just talking to him one day and he had mentioned they wanted to spin it off into its own series. He offered it to me and I was happy to do it. I love his work and the characters.
DRE:
Have you read Hellboy from the beginning?
GD:
I’ve been a fan of Mike’s since even before Hellboy, with Corum and his other early comics. I’ve always loved his style and storytelling.
DRE:
You and Mike started in comics around the same time.
GD:
Yeah but I had heard of his stuff before I got going. I was doing a lot of small press with the 80’s black and white boom.
DRE:
You and Mike are so well respected in the industry.
GD:
No one hates Mike’s art. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who did. He’s got the best imagination and design sense out there.
DRE:
Do you get to do your interpretations of the B.P.R.D. characters?
GD:
Pretty much. Mike doesn’t want me to be a clone of his style and I don’t think I am. He has certain specific things he wants for the characters, like the stripes on Abe Sapien’s head. But then it’s open to how I interpret it into my art style. They’ve given me lots of freedom. Mike does go over everything and tells me things that would work better. He’s always right [laughs]. Working with him has been a joy, the same goes for working with [B.P.R.D. writer] John Arcudi on the new series, everything has been going really smoothly.
DRE:
It seems that you two see Abe as a guy who knows what to do in most satiations.
GD:
Yes but he’s very reserved with that calmness about him. When the situation arises he just takes care of it, but there is no hidden anger in him. I mean he’s not a character that only reacts when he’s cornered.
DRE:
Are you able to make the characters and story relevant for yourself or is it just having fun with the story?
GD:
A little bit of both. I put my own efforts into it. First and foremost I want to be proud of what I am doing with it then I want Mike to be proud of what I’ve done. But that all happens within the course of doing it which comes from doing comics for years. If you over think nothing gets done or it comes out too forced and stiff. When I started B.P.R.D. I was under a lot of pressure because I didn’t want to fuck it up. But the more I do the more comfortable I get.
DRE:
Have you gotten to draw Hellboy yet?
GD:
Hellboy isn’t in B.P.R.D, so I don’t get to draw him very much. I did a cover with Hellboy on it when Wizard Magazine did a special Hellboy/B.P.R.D. promo comic.
DRE:
You started doing B.P.R.D. before the Hellboy movie was out, so what did you think of the movie?
GD:
I liked it a lot. It had a lot of the feel of the comic and became its own thing too.
DRE:
Do you get a full script from John Arcudi for B.P.R.D.?
GD:
Yeah pretty much. He talks with Mike and they go over the storyline. Then John will put together the script and give it to me to start layouts on before penciling. His scripts have full dialogue, but they are still open so I can break them down and layout the page, if there something specific he has in mind for a scene he’ll script it out completely.
DRE:
What’s the next B.P.R.D. miniseries about?
GD:
It’s called The Black Flame. It continues on after The Dead and in it the B.P.R.D. guys have a problem with the frog monsters and we introduce a villain that had never been seen before but has been heard of in the B.P.R.D. world. That’s all I can hint at.
DRE:
One of the reasons I was able to get this on SuicideGirls is because of Honor Among Punks.
GD:
Ah from all those years ago.
DRE:
I thought ibooks reprinting of it came out great.
GD:
Yeah the scans of the pages were really crisp. I was surprised because they had to do that from the old print comic. I didn’t have a lot of the original art left. I was happy they were able to keep the cost low too.
Since the book ends on a cliffhanger I got some people writing me and asking when it was going to end [laughs]. I write them saying it will end sometime but I have other stuff to do first. I always planned to finish off the story of Baker Street.
Since the book ends on a cliffhanger I got some people writing me and asking when it was going to end [laughs]. I write them saying it will end sometime but I have other stuff to do first. I always planned to finish off the story of Baker Street.
DRE:
Do you think you and Gary Reed will ever finish it?
GD:
I’m working on B.P.R.D. full time now along with my creator owned series called The Marquis and some other stuff, so once that’s done I’ll probably go back and finish Baker Street. We only had maybe another ten issues to go.
DRE:
Were you a punk?
GD:
Yeah but now my hair is kind of gone and so are my cheekbones but that was me back then around 1988 or so.
DRE:
Were you in a band?
GD:
I was never in a band.
DRE:
That’s a surprise!
GD:
I was one of the few punks that didn’t have their own band. I was the guy doing the flyer art and comics.
DRE:
Was there a big scene where you grew up in Michigan?
GD:
It wasn’t huge but it was kind of what I portrayed in the comic, just not the murder mystery part. There was a group of friends who’d hang around and meet at different clubs, watch out for each other.
I’m out of touch so I don’t even know what punk is now.
I’m out of touch so I don’t even know what punk is now.
DRE:
What were the bands you were into?
GD:
I liked Vice Squad, The Clash, Sex Pistols, Crass and some local bands I can’t even remember the names of. Sometimes at comic conventions I will meet some guy I used to hang out with and I don’t even recognize him. “When did you get old?”
DRE:
It would be better if you never seen them again.
GD:
That’s right because it just makes me feel old.
DRE:
When did punk end for you?
GD:
I probably started getting out of it in 1993 or 94. I just got tired of scraping by and living hand to mouth. It was fun for a while but the older you get the more fed up you are with that kind of shit.
DRE:
You were fed up with the establishment AND being a punk.
GD:
That’s right, I was fed up with the establishment and living like shit. But I still have good memories of bad times.
DRE:
Do you keep in touch with anyone back then?
GD:
Naw, like I said I just bump into them sometimes. I’m not even sure what a lot of them ended up doing.
DRE:
How long did you draw Sandman Mystery Theatre for?
GD:
It lasted for about 75 issues and I think I did just under 50 issues of it.
DRE:
How did that come to you?
GD:
Matt Wagner was a fan of Baker Street and wanted to collaborate on something of DC. He wanted me to go through a bunch of old DC characters and pick out some I thought would be fun for him to revamp for Vertigo. I wanted something that had an old pulp feel like the Golden Age Sandman. That was one I didn’t think they would want to do because of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. But Matt figured out that that would be the hook and that’s why I think he pitched it to DC.
DRE:
Has anyone talked about bringing that Sandman back?
GD:
Not that I hear. They just now started collecting the issues into trade paperbacks.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
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