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| Entrevista Brian Bolland. An interview for the Spanish edition of Bolland Strips! |
| Looking at your career we see that your covers and illustrations production exceeds by far your comics production. Do you enjoy better doing covers over interiors or is there another reason for this? |
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| At the moment I seem to enjoy doing interior pages more than covers. When you've drawn a few hundred covers you begin to run out of ideas. Occasionally I have a complete script to work from and there's a perfect image in there that'll make a great cover - and that's always exciting. Sometimes we have to get a cover image ready quickly for solicitation, the script hasn't been finished and I only have a vague idea what's going on in the story. That makes it harder. Also I'm not always as interested in the characters I'm given to draw. I can only do covers on books that are offered to me. There are certain kinds of characters that don't particularly inspire me but I have to draw them anyway because that's the work currently on offer. On the plus side: covers give me the opportunity to experiment (with photo collage etc.) more than interiors - and they pay much better. |
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| Bolland Strips compiles stories where you did not only the art but the writing. Do you consider this works more yours than your cover illustrations and collaborations with other writers? And if so, What where your motivations to take this more personal path? |
| After working on Alan Moore's Killing Joke I couldn't think of another writer I was keen to work with. There's something about being a comic artist that places you in the position of being a skilled craftsman in the service of other people's visions. Before I became a professional I used the comics medium purely as a means of self expression. In Bolland Strips I was merely returning to that position. |
| Please tell us about how The Actress & the Bishop and Mr. Mamoulian where born. |
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Back in 1985 or so I drew a portfolio of prints for French Publisher Editions Deesse. One of them contained my first image of the Actress & the Bishop. Much later Garry Leach and Dave Elliott were putting together an anthology comic, A1. They asked me to contribute 3 pages written and drawn by me. The Actress & the Bishop were there waiting to tell their story.
In about 1986 I'd been looking at some of the quick cartoon strips I'd drawn during my student days. I was getting frustrated at just how long my "proper" work was taking and I wanted to draw something VERY quickly and to hell with what it looked like. Gradually I got more drawn into the world of the characters in Mr. Mamoulian and the possibilities of the form. I was always greatly impressed with the artists who drew super-hero comics but as an adult I'd grown out of reading about super-heroes. Mamoulian was a character who enabled me to speak about things that were more relevant to me. |
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| In the introduction to The Actress & the Bishop you wrote that we are all running in the air like Wyle E. Coyote and that from that image came the dramatic thrust of the stories. This “running in the air” concept may sound a little nihilist but then we discover that you treat your characters with supreme tenderness, so… nihilist?, pessimist?, optimist?, a combination of the three? What kind of author (and human being) do you consider yourself? |
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Wow! A lot of deep philosophical questions and so little space to answer them! Firstly: If I explained precisely what I meant in the Actress & the Bishop there would be nothing left for the reader to discover. The "walking on air" metaphor is really there for the reader to ponder for themselves. Okay. Let me flesh it out. Much of the way we humans perceive the world has been taught to us by our elders. Up until the Enlightenment that understanding has been predicated on the idea of there being a god. Now that science and reason has seriously eroded that idea, and is more likely to be an anathema to the idea of a god, the firm ground which once supported those of a religious disposition has now been whipped away. And yet the religiously minded, indeed our civilizations as a whole, are running along in the firm belief that that nonexsistant ground is still there supporting us. As with Wyle E. Coyote, it's not for some time that reality (unpleasant reality) sets in and he realizes that there's nothing holding him up - and he falls. The metaphor then lets me down because the fall suggests a terrible disaster. To me it suggests a moment of clear understand. A moment of coming to terms with the truth.
In "The Thing in the Shed" we have (my attempt at) a set of interlocking assumptions - a set of mutually supporting beliefs, if you like - based on and revolving round the assumption of the existence of an entity that you neither see nor hear and doesn't intervene in any way - all of which are, in the end, revealed to be intrue. I'll leave that one for you to work out.
I've just looked up the word "nihilist" in the dictionary. The definition I get is "One who rejects all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless". To begin with: many people would find that definition to be nonsense on the grounds that religion and morality have very little to do with each other. Religion is the belief in a supernatural god along with its accompanying lesser gods and the unswerving loyalty to its tenets and traditions. Morality is about behaving decently to your fellow human beings and (one would argue) to other species and to the environment you live in. You could go on debating the details of that endlessly. In fact religion and morality are woefully at odds with each other. Finally: to say that life is "meaningless" would first require you to define the "meaning" of life. Do you mean "What is life for?" You could fill a whole book full of this discussion! The concept of a deity, the concept of morality and the concept of meaningfullness are all separate issues and have only been (erroneously) lumped together by tradition.
What kind of author do I consider myself to be? Well, firstly, I'm not to be taken too seriously. The way I draw and the way I choose to write does not lend itself to very serious content. I would never write and draw anything about the Holocaust or about the 9/11 attacks because my style and mode would trivialize it. That's not to say I don't have serious views on those things. If I alluded to those things it would probably be hidden behind layers of allegorical fun and games.
WHAT KIND OF HUMAN BEING AM I? Yikes! Well, I'm just this dull, forgettable, little man (although I'm really quite tall) who, nonetheless, has to grapple with all the big questions we all have to grapple with, equipped with only a mediocre brain to do so. Meanwhile I have to balance a degree of self expression with the need to earn a living as a comic artist. |
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| Speaking about running in the air, Mr. Mamoulian is an expert in doing so, with the addition that he seems very aware of his “aerial runner” condition. Do you think that awareness is the cause of him being and outcast, “some sort of huge rodent” in the eyes of world? |
| I was going through quite a lonely time in my life. Like Mr. Mamoulian I spent a lot of time sitting in London cafés observing people and feeling like an outsider. A few of the interactions he had happened to me. Particularly the one where the two American girls do a drawing of him. Exactly that happened to me on a plane flying to the US. The "huge rodent" thing was really because Mamoulian looks more like a hedgehog than a man. He's a projection of my own subjective body image as I declined into middle age. |
| You not only created Mr. Mamoulian but you also created his creator, Mr. Alban Skandabeg. What can you tells us about this mysterious Albanian artist and the relationship you both enjoy? (And, above all, why did he stop sending you pages for the space of six long years?) |
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| I started drawing Mr. Mamoulian in the 1980s. Just before Gorbachev and Glasnost. Some time before the sudden end to communism in Eastern Europe. Hence the "Scorpions" story. Back in those days I used to listen the the English language service or Radio Moscow (with Joe Adamov) and the wonderfully weird Radio Tyranna coming from Albania. In fact, at the time, Albania was the remotest and most paranoid of the Communist states with its despotic leader Enver Hoxha (we'd better check spelling). Even weirder: there was a little shop in a back street of London's Covent Garden called the Albanian Shop. In it you could buy busts of Enver Hoxha, books of his writings, Albanian felt hats, badges. That kinda thing. I found the place fascinating. Albania has a folk hero called Skandabeg. They have statues of him on horseback. I've long since forgotten exactly who he was. I just stole the name as the name of a struggling artist who was passing his work off as my own. A few years ago I went to Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia). Both trips were fascinating. There are some talented comic artists and writers there. I was asked about the Albanian element in Mr. Mamoulian. Serbia and Albania have a bitter dispute over Kosovo. I realized that in fleshing out Skandabeg's back story I was trampling over sensitive political issues with insufficient understanding of them. I could talk to you about my adventures in the Balkans and the things I learned there. But there isn't room here. |
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| Are we going to see more of the lives of the Actress, the Bishop and Mr. Mamoulian in the future (or any other character written and drawn by Mr. Brian Bolland)? |
| I have other Actress & Bishop stories bubbling away waiting for somewhere for them to be published. Negative Burn is using more Mamoulian, including a full color cover story - but I'm not sure whether the comic exists at the moment. There are other projects too, but who knows whether I'll ever do them. |
| The works compiled in Bolland Strips are going to be published for the first time in Spain. How do you think your fans here –who don’t know this “other Bolland”- will react at your stripping? |
| I understand that people in Spain know me for Camelot 3000 more than Judge Dredd. I don't know what they'll make of Bolland Strips! Some of Mamoulian may be baffling but there may be moments universal enough to strike a funny chord. I can't imagine how any of it will translate! Making fun of people in ecclesiastical positions has a certain appeal, especially in Catholic countries, I would imagine. People will either find it amusing, incomprehensible or I'll be burned at the stake! |
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