How did you first start getting into art?
DM: I've made things since I was a child. My mother was a first grade teacher and she had art supplies around since I was a kid. I'd see her constructing things to use as lesson plans for her students to learn visually. I suppose that early example of constructing images as communication was absorbed in my formative years. I began making things three dimensionally first, with clay, and then wooden blocks that I would eventually nail together, and then constructing out of cardboard & empty boxes: vehicles, planes, castles and robots. I started drawing on the things that I built three dimensionally, and then I began drawing to make stories as a child.
What are your main tools when creating a new piece?
DM: It depends what I'm working on. For fun, I often do drawings from life with a brush and ink. When I'm telling stories in book form, I often choose a medium and visual style that I think will best tell that particular story, and maybe even use a different approach and medium from scene to scene in that same story. In comics I may use watercolor, or acrylic, or collage, photography, and a variety of three dimensional approach contrasted together.
How do you choose your subject matter?
DM: In my work in comics, like Kabuki or Daredevil, or my children's books, like The Shy Creatures, it begins with the story and the characters. If it is a personal painting or drawing or sculpture it is likely to be a working out of ideas or feelings or based on someone in my life. Ultimately, my writing, my visuals, my stories in my comics, are a laboratory for me to work things out, to experiment, and tinker and play and make a kind of sense and order of things in my life, my ideas, my experiences, from childhood and current.
Is it fair to say your work has a sexual quality?
DM: In the stories, they are based on characters, and the characters take on a life of their own. So I suppose the characters have their own unique and diverse identities and psychologies. When I'm drawing people from life, I also like to think that the unique and diverse identities and psychologies of the live subject come through in the image to a degree. I very much enjoy drawing humans from life because it seems to be a kind of collaboration between the drawing and the subject being drawn. I think an inherent sexuality can come through in that way. From live humans being drawn, as well as unique personalities of characters that have developed in stories over years. Recently, I have been invited to exhibit some of my figure drawings from life in a Los Angeles exhibit of erotic art, so perhaps that is something that came through in some of my work to some people.
What do you hope your art conveys to people?
DM: Most of the time, my visual art is in the service of some kind of story. So, I hope it is communicating the textures of the characters involved. And ultimately something that the reader can relate to and perhaps empathize with, or if I'm lucky, articulate something for the reader that they have known about themselves but have not been able to articulate on their own. There is a degree of me expressing myself into my work and my characters and stories, but I hope the work is big enough and universal enough that the readers can look and my work and instead of seeing me, they see a part of themselves, or a least a character they can relate to.
Did you grow up as a comic book fan?
DM: I'm still growing up I think. There is a part of me that doesn't draw the lines between childhood and adult and I think that is the part that keeps the mind limber and playful and open to making whimsical experimentation. And I think comics are helpful to keeping that aspect of the mind limber and playful and experimental. My first real introduction to comics as a child was with the Frank Miller, Klaus Janson Daredevil comics. It had a visceral power for me. It was outside of my experience and beyond my comfort zone when I read one at nine years old. A few years later, I found the next issue by chance at a second hand store, and I was more able to handle it then. I could then see why it had such a powerful effect on me. I could see the intelligence behind the design and storytelling. The creators using shadow, lighting, angles, rhythm, weather, line, shape, body language all in the service of the story.
What I love about comics is that magic that they have with the psychology of the reader. Each page is designed to interact and connect with the imagination of the reader. The real magic of comic books is that the movement, and the art of them, happens not on the page, but in the readers mind between the panels. You design the panels in just the right way and with the right composition and rhythm and pace so that the reader fills in the movement between them in their own mind. Inside the minde of the reader is where my real storytelling canvas lives. The comics themselves, the page, is a navigational device, it is a map really, an atlas, but it is as different from the real action and art of the story as an atlas is to the three dimensional geography it is meant to describe and navigate.
I really think as comic books and graphic novels as more a psychic performance art than something that is confined to a page. The page is just where the incantation is ciphered.... and it is released and made real, and turned into art inside the readers mind when their mind and psychology deciphers the encryptions of the page that are so meticulously planted as dormant but living story and characters that breath only when the attention of the reader breathes them in. Together, the DNA of what the creator put into the page from themselves, dances with the DNA of the psychic experiences and baggage, and personal lens, that the reader brings to it... and as such each story has a different life in each reader, and a different life to the same reader when read at different stages of their lives. As such, I like to encrypt levels of meaning into the story that will reward each repeat reading to the experiencer as new levels of the story are unlocked each time they are read.
What is your favorite comic book of all time?
DM: It's always my next one. When I'm working on the current one, it's the discipline of the execution of it, there are limitless creative choices involved, but my mind still busies itself with the broad conceptual gymnastics of filtering ideas from daily life in to the next stories. I'm always envisioning the next project that I would want to exist, that I would want to read, and then programming my subconscious to percolate on the directive of making that idea into a reality.
Who is your favorite comic book artist?
DM: I've been fortunate to work with many of them. On the current Daredevil: End of Day story that I am writing with Brian Michael Bendis, the artists on it are Bill Sienkiewicz and Klaus Janson, with Alex Maleev also contributing. These are all artists that I respect and Bill and Klaus are artists that I grew up with and have inspired me since I was a child, they were mentors to me before they met me and now they are among my closest friends and collaborators. I also like Paul Pope who is an artist that I've known since we were very young and we were able to collaborate on the adaptation I wrote of Sci-Fi master Philip K. Dick called Electric Ant from Marvel Comics. Brian Bendis and Mike Oeming are creators that I grew up with and we all learned from each other in our early formative years and enjoy working together now. Bendis and Oeming are the O and the B in our long-standing M.O.B. creative collective. Together the three of us formed the creator owned imprint at Marvel Comics called ICON when we brought Powers and Kabuki to Marvel Comics in 2004. Frank Miller was a huge influence on me when I was young. As was Jim Steranko who acted as a kind of mentor to me early on when I was starting with Kabuki. [Mike] Mignola is a brilliant creative voice as well.
Favorite non-comic artist?
DM: Kent Williams works as a fine artist now, though he has done brilliant comics in the past. To me he is on the level of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, all of whom I've learned from, but I have the golden fortune of knowing Kent in his lifetime and counting him as a dear friend. Jean Michelle Basquiat is a huge influence, I love how he intersects image and word meaning, and I love many classic Japanese artists for the same reason. The reach of Picasso and Warhol is inescapable in terms of their art incarnating their philosophy. Filmmakers and writers are a great influence on me as well.
When did you first conceive of Kabuki?
DM: The first volume was created and published as my college senior writing thesis in Literature. I was twenty when I began the first volume in 1993, and I just kept making it after college as well.
Did you think it would continue for as long as it has?
DM: I hadn't thought that far ahead. I certainly wasn't thinking about twenty years in advance. The book was really a laboratory for me to integrate my passions and interests and make sense of things in my own life that I was experiencing in a very early formative time in my life. When I look back on that first volume, I can see so many things now that I was working out unconsciously at the time. I think the book Kabuki was a vehicle for my conscious efforts and my unconscious mind to collaborate in a way that was probably very helpful and therapeutic for me. Looking back on that first volume, I can see some things that I would view as heavy handed or crude now, things that I would handle differently now or finesse, but it still holds a charm for me as wall, even though there is a rawness to it at times, I can see that passion and joyfulness of the creating of it and the young person that I was when I made it. Each volume is in a way a kind of diary for me as well as for the characters and I think it charts the evolution of myself as well as it does the Kabuki character herself, and the world, the other characters and the story as a living, changing, evolving thing.
Have you always had a long-term plan for Kabuki, or have you started to create more of the series as the years have progressed?
DM: At first I had a very big story, but I was naive about how much physical space the story would actually take. I thought I could tell the initial story in a much smaller page count and issue count. One of the joys of making that story, was the learning how to make the story. The best way to learn how to make a comic is to make one.
In this case, I narrowed down what would fit into the first volume, and realized some other things were not a part of that first story. And then in the making of that story, I would be thinking about the next stage that the characters would go, and what I would want to explore with them. So, sometimes, I would have ideas, but know that it would be years before I would be doing the stage of the story that those ideas were right for.
I developed a system that I still use to this day. Anytime I have an idea, I just write it down on paper and put it in a folder with the name of the story or project it will most likely fit into. This way you get the idea out, and record it. And you can direct the idea to the right project. Then years later, when it is time for that part of the story, or that project, you pull out the folder and see all these hundreds of pieces of paper that you don't even remember writing. And then you read them and react to them, and decide what order they go in, which ones don't belong, in this story (you put them in a different folder) and then you fill in the spaces between that new order with other ideas.
Have you been to Japan before? Why did you want base a comic title around Japanese culture?
DM: Yes, I've been to Japan several times. I was making Kabuki in college and I had a friend in my painting and drawing classes who was Japanese, so when I had to choose a foreign language to study, I chose Japanese, which I studied in college for a couple years. I was learning Japanese history and mythology and various philosophy and world religious in collage, as well as my travels, so I had this rich world of mythology and information that was pouring into my own. The archetypes of that mythology served as a structure for my story for certain reasons. One of those reasons is this: I was a big admirer of autobiographical comics. Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. I love Ivan Brunetti's Schizo. But, I was so young in college that I did not feel unselfconscious enough to write an autobiographic story at that age. I didn't even feel fully formed enough as a human or to have the objectivity to be able to do that. And I did not want to fall into the trap of making the main character an idealized version of myself. So I thought that I could write more unselfconsciously about very personal things in my life if I could write through a veil. Through a mask in a way.
I also thought at that age, that I could write something that would be more universal and relatable to readers if they could look at the characters and see themselves rather than seeing me. So, I thought that I could tell a personal story but make many of the details very different from myself. I began with the choice to make the main character a different gender. And then to set it in a different part of the world, with a different culture, and even in the ambiguous near future. That time setting would give me a liberty to turn up the volume of things, to discuss the present through the metaphors of the past and future. And also to make social political commentary about our own culture, and many cultures, but through the lens of another culture. That way readers can make the connections themselves about their own culture when viewing values through the lens of another.
Another aspect of the story structure is that it is told through the structures of both Western and Easter fairytales and children's stories. The first Kabuki volume is a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. The journey from pawn to queen. The classic hero's journey from childhood to adult consciousness. From low birth and servitude to the most powerful piece on the chess board that can change direction. The story is also told through the structure of the classic Japanese Ghost Story. These are the main stories of the Japanese Kabuki dramas. Usually it is a wronged woman, who returns from the next world to set things right in the material world, and exact unfinished business of Earthly designs before her spirit can move on peaceably. So, though the story is firmly set in a crime story or speculative fiction story, it can also be viewed as the Japanese Ghost Story from a certain angle.
When did you start working on Daredevil?
DM: It was that first Kabuki story that got me the invite to be the writer of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. I believe that that invitation came in 1997 from Joe Quesada, and I began working as writer on Daredevil in 1998 taking over from writer/director Kevin Smith. In the process of that story, writing Daredevil with Joe Quesada as the artist, Joe and I were collaborating on the covers together. In the process of sending Joe a new painted Daredevil cover, I included in the Fed Ex package a set of my friend Brian Bendis' crime comics Torso to introduce Joe to Brian's work. Joe liked Brian's writing but not his art, and gave Brian and I green light to work on something at Marvel together. We ended up doing the next Daredevil arc together called Daredevil: Wake Up. After that Joe Quesada had asked me to write and draw a series for Echo, the character created in my first Daredevil story, and that Echo story became another storyline in the Daredevil series as well.
So that's how you an Brian Michael Bendis come together to write for Daredevil?
DM: We are co-writing Daredevil: End of Days coming out from Marvel Comics right now. But, that really comes from a long history of collaboration since we began working together as friends in 1993. In those early days we were working on comics together and making our independent creator owned comics. I was writing Kabuki, but I wasn't planning on doing the art for it. I was just thinking of myself as writer of it and I was looking for an artist to draw it. Brian was working as an artist back then and he was going to do the art for Kabuki. So, I have these wonderful Brian Michael Bendis Kabuki drawings from 1993. I ended up making Kabuki as both writer and artist and Brian made his crime comics Jinx, Goldfish, & Torso.
In 2004 we brought our creator owned comics Kabuki, and Powers (which Brian makes with Mike Oeming) to Marvel and formed the creator-owned line of comics ICON at Marvel Comics with our two books. When we were deciding on a name for the imprint, I remember Brian telling me that Epic and Legend were the coolest names for an imprint that had been used, and I suggested calling it ICON as a word that fit that contexts of our favorite creator owned imprint, and Marvel accepted the name that we chose for it. It was a big deal to us that Marvel was not publishing our creator-owned books Powers and Kabuki, and we even got to form and name the imprint there. With our work on Daredevel: End of Days, it is a joy to be collaborating on a story together again, and it acts as a kind of book-end to our first Daredevil: Wake Up story. It's a wonderful mystery and we've found an inspiring way to co-write the story together.
How did you get started with work on Dexter?
DM: Showtime sent me an email about working on Dexter after Dark Horse Editor in Chief Scott Allie referred me to them.
What's been the best part of that experience so far?
DM: A number of wonderful things came out of that. Most recently I was happy to learn that my work on those episodes was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award and a Producers Guild of America Award. I was able to work with Dexter writer Tim Schlattman and Dexter writer & producer Scott Reynolds. I was invited to visit the sets and tour them, and they had filled a set of the apartment of one of the Dexter characters with Kabuki books and masks, and statues, and my art books, and had a giant mural of one of my characters painted on the wall where it was always featured very prominently in the episodes. There is a great shot of Dexter eyeing the statue of my character Kabuki in that set. Each time Dexter aired, a lot of readers of my Kabuki comic would get a kick out of that.
I did all of the art to the last season of Dexter Early Cuts that was animated as a prequel to season one. You can watch in on you tube. Just search: "David Mack Dexter" and you can see them for free. The season before that, I had the honor of collaborating on the episodes with comic book legend Bill Sienkiewicz. We were already working together on Daredevil: End of Days, but that was mostly my working in writer capacity, and to collaborate with Bill on a daily basis on artwork together was just a wonderful experience. A lot of times I was working from his layouts or photo references and drawings, so it was a wonderfully close collaboration that I learned a lot from. And most importantly we became much closer friends through it, and Bill remains one of my closest and dearest friends to this day. He Klaus Janson, and I just returned from London where we were signing and discussing our current collaboration on Daredevil: End of Days.
What project or piece of art are you most proud of in your career?
DM: A lot of projects are dear to me because of the collaborations involved. Like when I began writing Daredevil, with Joe Quesada on art, or the first Daredevil: Wake Up story I did with Brian Bendis, or the poetry collaboration with Neil Gaiman. Or Comic Book Tattoo that I did with Tori Amos. But, if I was to point out one book was the best example of my work, in one book, story and art, that would be Kabuki: The Alchemy. It has the most diversity of media, story and art styles in one comprehensive book with story, characters and themes, philosophies are are very personal to me. And also has a lot of extra features in the book and an amazing introduction by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.
Favorite comics cover you've created?
DM: Some of the covers that I created for Kabuki: The Alchemy are probably my favorites. Like issues #4, #6, #7. I like how they visualize the themes in the books. I'm also enjoying making the current covers on Daredevil: End of Days. I did an entire series of covers for the recent Willow series from Dark horse. There is a making of those on line. And I did a fun Psylocke cover for Marvel's 5 Ronin.
If you could work with any writer or artist in the comics field, who would it be?
DM: I would love to do more work with Neil Gaiman. Bill Sienkiewicz and I were forming a project to work on during our long flights together to and from London. I'd love to write a project to accompany the art of my friend Kent Williams. Paul Pope and I got a chance to work together a bit in my adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant at Marvel, but I would love to work with him more. I would love to work with Mike Mignola.
What's your advice to younger artists wanting to find the kinds of success you have?
DM: Imagine that book that you would want to read, imagine the book that does not exist but that you wished would exist. And make that. Make it with all of your passion and efforts. Start it. Finish it. And then show it to people. Keep doing that with every different project. The best way to learn how to make a comic, writing or drawing, is to just make it. You learn in the process what you want from it, and what it wants to be from you.
Also, team up with a collaborator. This is what Brian Bendis and I did when we were starting in the early nineties. Even if you have your own personal projects you can learn a lot from collaborating with a creator that you respect, and you can be of help to each other.
What things will you be working on in 2013?
DM: Daredevil: End of Days will finish up in the next couple months with #8, and then it will be collected in an oversize hardcover with 24 pages of extra features and art. We are so grateful for the amazing response this book is getting. Brian Bendis and I will be making a creator-owned project. That is very exciting.
I've written several new children's books that I can't wait to make real. I have a new art book in the works. I have some gallery exhibits planned. And Kabuki readers will be pleased to hear that I am working on the next Kabuki stories. Right now it has been 20 years since I began working on Kabuki, and next year will be the 20 year anniversary of Kabuki being published. So, there are some special things in the works for that. Brush up on reading all your Kabuki volumes in the meantime.
DM: I've made things since I was a child. My mother was a first grade teacher and she had art supplies around since I was a kid. I'd see her constructing things to use as lesson plans for her students to learn visually. I suppose that early example of constructing images as communication was absorbed in my formative years. I began making things three dimensionally first, with clay, and then wooden blocks that I would eventually nail together, and then constructing out of cardboard & empty boxes: vehicles, planes, castles and robots. I started drawing on the things that I built three dimensionally, and then I began drawing to make stories as a child.
What are your main tools when creating a new piece?
DM: It depends what I'm working on. For fun, I often do drawings from life with a brush and ink. When I'm telling stories in book form, I often choose a medium and visual style that I think will best tell that particular story, and maybe even use a different approach and medium from scene to scene in that same story. In comics I may use watercolor, or acrylic, or collage, photography, and a variety of three dimensional approach contrasted together.
How do you choose your subject matter?
DM: In my work in comics, like Kabuki or Daredevil, or my children's books, like The Shy Creatures, it begins with the story and the characters. If it is a personal painting or drawing or sculpture it is likely to be a working out of ideas or feelings or based on someone in my life. Ultimately, my writing, my visuals, my stories in my comics, are a laboratory for me to work things out, to experiment, and tinker and play and make a kind of sense and order of things in my life, my ideas, my experiences, from childhood and current.
Is it fair to say your work has a sexual quality?
DM: In the stories, they are based on characters, and the characters take on a life of their own. So I suppose the characters have their own unique and diverse identities and psychologies. When I'm drawing people from life, I also like to think that the unique and diverse identities and psychologies of the live subject come through in the image to a degree. I very much enjoy drawing humans from life because it seems to be a kind of collaboration between the drawing and the subject being drawn. I think an inherent sexuality can come through in that way. From live humans being drawn, as well as unique personalities of characters that have developed in stories over years. Recently, I have been invited to exhibit some of my figure drawings from life in a Los Angeles exhibit of erotic art, so perhaps that is something that came through in some of my work to some people.
What do you hope your art conveys to people?
DM: Most of the time, my visual art is in the service of some kind of story. So, I hope it is communicating the textures of the characters involved. And ultimately something that the reader can relate to and perhaps empathize with, or if I'm lucky, articulate something for the reader that they have known about themselves but have not been able to articulate on their own. There is a degree of me expressing myself into my work and my characters and stories, but I hope the work is big enough and universal enough that the readers can look and my work and instead of seeing me, they see a part of themselves, or a least a character they can relate to.
Did you grow up as a comic book fan?
DM: I'm still growing up I think. There is a part of me that doesn't draw the lines between childhood and adult and I think that is the part that keeps the mind limber and playful and open to making whimsical experimentation. And I think comics are helpful to keeping that aspect of the mind limber and playful and experimental. My first real introduction to comics as a child was with the Frank Miller, Klaus Janson Daredevil comics. It had a visceral power for me. It was outside of my experience and beyond my comfort zone when I read one at nine years old. A few years later, I found the next issue by chance at a second hand store, and I was more able to handle it then. I could then see why it had such a powerful effect on me. I could see the intelligence behind the design and storytelling. The creators using shadow, lighting, angles, rhythm, weather, line, shape, body language all in the service of the story.
What I love about comics is that magic that they have with the psychology of the reader. Each page is designed to interact and connect with the imagination of the reader. The real magic of comic books is that the movement, and the art of them, happens not on the page, but in the readers mind between the panels. You design the panels in just the right way and with the right composition and rhythm and pace so that the reader fills in the movement between them in their own mind. Inside the minde of the reader is where my real storytelling canvas lives. The comics themselves, the page, is a navigational device, it is a map really, an atlas, but it is as different from the real action and art of the story as an atlas is to the three dimensional geography it is meant to describe and navigate.
I really think as comic books and graphic novels as more a psychic performance art than something that is confined to a page. The page is just where the incantation is ciphered.... and it is released and made real, and turned into art inside the readers mind when their mind and psychology deciphers the encryptions of the page that are so meticulously planted as dormant but living story and characters that breath only when the attention of the reader breathes them in. Together, the DNA of what the creator put into the page from themselves, dances with the DNA of the psychic experiences and baggage, and personal lens, that the reader brings to it... and as such each story has a different life in each reader, and a different life to the same reader when read at different stages of their lives. As such, I like to encrypt levels of meaning into the story that will reward each repeat reading to the experiencer as new levels of the story are unlocked each time they are read.
What is your favorite comic book of all time?
DM: It's always my next one. When I'm working on the current one, it's the discipline of the execution of it, there are limitless creative choices involved, but my mind still busies itself with the broad conceptual gymnastics of filtering ideas from daily life in to the next stories. I'm always envisioning the next project that I would want to exist, that I would want to read, and then programming my subconscious to percolate on the directive of making that idea into a reality.
Who is your favorite comic book artist?
DM: I've been fortunate to work with many of them. On the current Daredevil: End of Day story that I am writing with Brian Michael Bendis, the artists on it are Bill Sienkiewicz and Klaus Janson, with Alex Maleev also contributing. These are all artists that I respect and Bill and Klaus are artists that I grew up with and have inspired me since I was a child, they were mentors to me before they met me and now they are among my closest friends and collaborators. I also like Paul Pope who is an artist that I've known since we were very young and we were able to collaborate on the adaptation I wrote of Sci-Fi master Philip K. Dick called Electric Ant from Marvel Comics. Brian Bendis and Mike Oeming are creators that I grew up with and we all learned from each other in our early formative years and enjoy working together now. Bendis and Oeming are the O and the B in our long-standing M.O.B. creative collective. Together the three of us formed the creator owned imprint at Marvel Comics called ICON when we brought Powers and Kabuki to Marvel Comics in 2004. Frank Miller was a huge influence on me when I was young. As was Jim Steranko who acted as a kind of mentor to me early on when I was starting with Kabuki. [Mike] Mignola is a brilliant creative voice as well.
Favorite non-comic artist?
DM: Kent Williams works as a fine artist now, though he has done brilliant comics in the past. To me he is on the level of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, all of whom I've learned from, but I have the golden fortune of knowing Kent in his lifetime and counting him as a dear friend. Jean Michelle Basquiat is a huge influence, I love how he intersects image and word meaning, and I love many classic Japanese artists for the same reason. The reach of Picasso and Warhol is inescapable in terms of their art incarnating their philosophy. Filmmakers and writers are a great influence on me as well.
When did you first conceive of Kabuki?
DM: The first volume was created and published as my college senior writing thesis in Literature. I was twenty when I began the first volume in 1993, and I just kept making it after college as well.
Did you think it would continue for as long as it has?
DM: I hadn't thought that far ahead. I certainly wasn't thinking about twenty years in advance. The book was really a laboratory for me to integrate my passions and interests and make sense of things in my own life that I was experiencing in a very early formative time in my life. When I look back on that first volume, I can see so many things now that I was working out unconsciously at the time. I think the book Kabuki was a vehicle for my conscious efforts and my unconscious mind to collaborate in a way that was probably very helpful and therapeutic for me. Looking back on that first volume, I can see some things that I would view as heavy handed or crude now, things that I would handle differently now or finesse, but it still holds a charm for me as wall, even though there is a rawness to it at times, I can see that passion and joyfulness of the creating of it and the young person that I was when I made it. Each volume is in a way a kind of diary for me as well as for the characters and I think it charts the evolution of myself as well as it does the Kabuki character herself, and the world, the other characters and the story as a living, changing, evolving thing.
Have you always had a long-term plan for Kabuki, or have you started to create more of the series as the years have progressed?
DM: At first I had a very big story, but I was naive about how much physical space the story would actually take. I thought I could tell the initial story in a much smaller page count and issue count. One of the joys of making that story, was the learning how to make the story. The best way to learn how to make a comic is to make one.
In this case, I narrowed down what would fit into the first volume, and realized some other things were not a part of that first story. And then in the making of that story, I would be thinking about the next stage that the characters would go, and what I would want to explore with them. So, sometimes, I would have ideas, but know that it would be years before I would be doing the stage of the story that those ideas were right for.
I developed a system that I still use to this day. Anytime I have an idea, I just write it down on paper and put it in a folder with the name of the story or project it will most likely fit into. This way you get the idea out, and record it. And you can direct the idea to the right project. Then years later, when it is time for that part of the story, or that project, you pull out the folder and see all these hundreds of pieces of paper that you don't even remember writing. And then you read them and react to them, and decide what order they go in, which ones don't belong, in this story (you put them in a different folder) and then you fill in the spaces between that new order with other ideas.
Have you been to Japan before? Why did you want base a comic title around Japanese culture?
DM: Yes, I've been to Japan several times. I was making Kabuki in college and I had a friend in my painting and drawing classes who was Japanese, so when I had to choose a foreign language to study, I chose Japanese, which I studied in college for a couple years. I was learning Japanese history and mythology and various philosophy and world religious in collage, as well as my travels, so I had this rich world of mythology and information that was pouring into my own. The archetypes of that mythology served as a structure for my story for certain reasons. One of those reasons is this: I was a big admirer of autobiographical comics. Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. I love Ivan Brunetti's Schizo. But, I was so young in college that I did not feel unselfconscious enough to write an autobiographic story at that age. I didn't even feel fully formed enough as a human or to have the objectivity to be able to do that. And I did not want to fall into the trap of making the main character an idealized version of myself. So I thought that I could write more unselfconsciously about very personal things in my life if I could write through a veil. Through a mask in a way.
I also thought at that age, that I could write something that would be more universal and relatable to readers if they could look at the characters and see themselves rather than seeing me. So, I thought that I could tell a personal story but make many of the details very different from myself. I began with the choice to make the main character a different gender. And then to set it in a different part of the world, with a different culture, and even in the ambiguous near future. That time setting would give me a liberty to turn up the volume of things, to discuss the present through the metaphors of the past and future. And also to make social political commentary about our own culture, and many cultures, but through the lens of another culture. That way readers can make the connections themselves about their own culture when viewing values through the lens of another.
Another aspect of the story structure is that it is told through the structures of both Western and Easter fairytales and children's stories. The first Kabuki volume is a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. The journey from pawn to queen. The classic hero's journey from childhood to adult consciousness. From low birth and servitude to the most powerful piece on the chess board that can change direction. The story is also told through the structure of the classic Japanese Ghost Story. These are the main stories of the Japanese Kabuki dramas. Usually it is a wronged woman, who returns from the next world to set things right in the material world, and exact unfinished business of Earthly designs before her spirit can move on peaceably. So, though the story is firmly set in a crime story or speculative fiction story, it can also be viewed as the Japanese Ghost Story from a certain angle.
When did you start working on Daredevil?
DM: It was that first Kabuki story that got me the invite to be the writer of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. I believe that that invitation came in 1997 from Joe Quesada, and I began working as writer on Daredevil in 1998 taking over from writer/director Kevin Smith. In the process of that story, writing Daredevil with Joe Quesada as the artist, Joe and I were collaborating on the covers together. In the process of sending Joe a new painted Daredevil cover, I included in the Fed Ex package a set of my friend Brian Bendis' crime comics Torso to introduce Joe to Brian's work. Joe liked Brian's writing but not his art, and gave Brian and I green light to work on something at Marvel together. We ended up doing the next Daredevil arc together called Daredevil: Wake Up. After that Joe Quesada had asked me to write and draw a series for Echo, the character created in my first Daredevil story, and that Echo story became another storyline in the Daredevil series as well.
So that's how you an Brian Michael Bendis come together to write for Daredevil?
DM: We are co-writing Daredevil: End of Days coming out from Marvel Comics right now. But, that really comes from a long history of collaboration since we began working together as friends in 1993. In those early days we were working on comics together and making our independent creator owned comics. I was writing Kabuki, but I wasn't planning on doing the art for it. I was just thinking of myself as writer of it and I was looking for an artist to draw it. Brian was working as an artist back then and he was going to do the art for Kabuki. So, I have these wonderful Brian Michael Bendis Kabuki drawings from 1993. I ended up making Kabuki as both writer and artist and Brian made his crime comics Jinx, Goldfish, & Torso.
In 2004 we brought our creator owned comics Kabuki, and Powers (which Brian makes with Mike Oeming) to Marvel and formed the creator-owned line of comics ICON at Marvel Comics with our two books. When we were deciding on a name for the imprint, I remember Brian telling me that Epic and Legend were the coolest names for an imprint that had been used, and I suggested calling it ICON as a word that fit that contexts of our favorite creator owned imprint, and Marvel accepted the name that we chose for it. It was a big deal to us that Marvel was not publishing our creator-owned books Powers and Kabuki, and we even got to form and name the imprint there. With our work on Daredevel: End of Days, it is a joy to be collaborating on a story together again, and it acts as a kind of book-end to our first Daredevil: Wake Up story. It's a wonderful mystery and we've found an inspiring way to co-write the story together.
How did you get started with work on Dexter?
DM: Showtime sent me an email about working on Dexter after Dark Horse Editor in Chief Scott Allie referred me to them.
What's been the best part of that experience so far?
DM: A number of wonderful things came out of that. Most recently I was happy to learn that my work on those episodes was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award and a Producers Guild of America Award. I was able to work with Dexter writer Tim Schlattman and Dexter writer & producer Scott Reynolds. I was invited to visit the sets and tour them, and they had filled a set of the apartment of one of the Dexter characters with Kabuki books and masks, and statues, and my art books, and had a giant mural of one of my characters painted on the wall where it was always featured very prominently in the episodes. There is a great shot of Dexter eyeing the statue of my character Kabuki in that set. Each time Dexter aired, a lot of readers of my Kabuki comic would get a kick out of that.
I did all of the art to the last season of Dexter Early Cuts that was animated as a prequel to season one. You can watch in on you tube. Just search: "David Mack Dexter" and you can see them for free. The season before that, I had the honor of collaborating on the episodes with comic book legend Bill Sienkiewicz. We were already working together on Daredevil: End of Days, but that was mostly my working in writer capacity, and to collaborate with Bill on a daily basis on artwork together was just a wonderful experience. A lot of times I was working from his layouts or photo references and drawings, so it was a wonderfully close collaboration that I learned a lot from. And most importantly we became much closer friends through it, and Bill remains one of my closest and dearest friends to this day. He Klaus Janson, and I just returned from London where we were signing and discussing our current collaboration on Daredevil: End of Days.
What project or piece of art are you most proud of in your career?
DM: A lot of projects are dear to me because of the collaborations involved. Like when I began writing Daredevil, with Joe Quesada on art, or the first Daredevil: Wake Up story I did with Brian Bendis, or the poetry collaboration with Neil Gaiman. Or Comic Book Tattoo that I did with Tori Amos. But, if I was to point out one book was the best example of my work, in one book, story and art, that would be Kabuki: The Alchemy. It has the most diversity of media, story and art styles in one comprehensive book with story, characters and themes, philosophies are are very personal to me. And also has a lot of extra features in the book and an amazing introduction by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.
Favorite comics cover you've created?
DM: Some of the covers that I created for Kabuki: The Alchemy are probably my favorites. Like issues #4, #6, #7. I like how they visualize the themes in the books. I'm also enjoying making the current covers on Daredevil: End of Days. I did an entire series of covers for the recent Willow series from Dark horse. There is a making of those on line. And I did a fun Psylocke cover for Marvel's 5 Ronin.
If you could work with any writer or artist in the comics field, who would it be?
DM: I would love to do more work with Neil Gaiman. Bill Sienkiewicz and I were forming a project to work on during our long flights together to and from London. I'd love to write a project to accompany the art of my friend Kent Williams. Paul Pope and I got a chance to work together a bit in my adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant at Marvel, but I would love to work with him more. I would love to work with Mike Mignola.
What's your advice to younger artists wanting to find the kinds of success you have?
DM: Imagine that book that you would want to read, imagine the book that does not exist but that you wished would exist. And make that. Make it with all of your passion and efforts. Start it. Finish it. And then show it to people. Keep doing that with every different project. The best way to learn how to make a comic, writing or drawing, is to just make it. You learn in the process what you want from it, and what it wants to be from you.
Also, team up with a collaborator. This is what Brian Bendis and I did when we were starting in the early nineties. Even if you have your own personal projects you can learn a lot from collaborating with a creator that you respect, and you can be of help to each other.
What things will you be working on in 2013?
DM: Daredevil: End of Days will finish up in the next couple months with #8, and then it will be collected in an oversize hardcover with 24 pages of extra features and art. We are so grateful for the amazing response this book is getting. Brian Bendis and I will be making a creator-owned project. That is very exciting.
I've written several new children's books that I can't wait to make real. I have a new art book in the works. I have some gallery exhibits planned. And Kabuki readers will be pleased to hear that I am working on the next Kabuki stories. Right now it has been 20 years since I began working on Kabuki, and next year will be the 20 year anniversary of Kabuki being published. So, there are some special things in the works for that. Brush up on reading all your Kabuki volumes in the meantime.