So you've tried to create an atmosphere with a lot of space.

Yeah, although I do have the same things everyone would have. I suppose any time I've gone to another artist's studio, you find for the most part the same reference books and the same sort of set-up—a drafting board, an easel, stuff like that.

For The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, have you added anything to your studio? Objects or photographs or special reference books that help you or stimulate you with regard to this particular project?

Aside from a big corner where I'll throw any sort of reference I think I'll be able to use at some point, there hasn't been any major remodeling going on here for Solomon Kane. The music I listen to is a little different.

What do you listen to?

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of fantasy-oriented soundtracks and some 16th century music that I thought might help with the atmosphere a little bit. Maybe the changes are going on more inside of my head than they are in the studio to set up an atmosphere that would be sympathetic to this project. I mean, I'm not sitting around here wearing a codpiece or anything like that.

Solomon Kane strikes me as a project where mood might be more crucial than perhaps in another project. That's why I wanted to establish some of these things to try and see how you set the mood, which is somber, but aware of the presence of supernatural forces, etc.

That's something I think you really have to find an internal compartment for, more so than any sort of external surroundings. But that's not easy, especially when you're working on something that's taken almost a year. So to keep a certain sensibility of that somber fantastic mood requires a certain mindset. Once the mind is set that way, I could be working on this on a subway train. I have been places where I don't even notice what I'm looking at because I'm thinking about this project. That can be a bit of problem, too, stepping across the street or something like that.

In other words, I really try just to gain access through the imagination more than anything else.

When you say that does that mean that when you are out doing other things that you'll see something that will trigger or does that mean that you're so lost in your mind that you aren't really seeing anything?

It's probably a bit of both. I was at the zoo a few weeks ago with my wife and my children and there was this natural rainforest exhibit you walk through. There's baobab trees and recreations of hills with a certain kind of foliage. As I was looking at this stuff, all I could think is this is great I should be photographing it for Kane's adventures in the desert. So it's that sort of thing where I look for how I can apply whatever it is that I'm involved in at the moment back into this.

When you work, do you complete one story and then move to the next or do you move between stories?

No, I really like starting at the beginning and working my way through. [First] all the groundwork had to be laid and Marcelo and I had to decide how many illustrations there were going to be and which scenes were going to be illustrated. I worked out probably well over 200 roughs and ideas. We sorted through these things, then we put them into the context of the book where they would fall. Just this process took a few months. Once we had a foundation and a road plan for the whole book, I more or less just started at the beginning and worked my way through it. Since one illustration is as important as the next, it helps me keep track of how far I am in the project.

Is there any anecdote about when Marcelo first approached you?

I remember in one of our first conversations, he mentioned that maybe I could do this thing in my spare time between other jobs. When we think about that now—because it's become such an all-encompassing, day-in and day-out, yearlong, project, here—the idea of doing this between other jobs is laughable. He's very good. He's always looked out for my interests. We've grown to be quite friends because of this. I'm very fortunate that it's worked out this way. I don't think I've ever worked on a book project or comics project where I've just had the complete, unrestricted opportunity to try and realize my goals. Again, it's something that people will want to have on their bookshelves. I'm hoping it has a nice, elegant appeal, and I think there will be something in it for everyone from Howard fans to people enjoying my work.

You said you worked with Marcelo to determine which illustrations you would use. Did you read the stories first and present to him where you were inspired to do illustrations, or was this more of a collaborative process where he already had some ideas?

He had an idea right from the start, and it was based on The Sowers of the Thunder book, which was a finely illustrated version of those stories. That was initially his vision. We talked about that for quite a while. When it finally came to putting pencil to paper, I more or less did an illustration for every page of the story, hopefully not spending too long, because, at this point, these ideas could easily be thrown away. But nevertheless, there was a lot of thought in that, and I would paste them in this big scrapbook along the sides of the text. When I had that finished—that took me maybe two months—I sent that out to him. He just edited it since there was more than we needed in there. So I don't know how much back and forth there was with the ideas, but he's a good editor, and he has great ideas. Once he told me how he saw it, then I was able to go ahead and not have to worry about trying to second-guess someone else, which I think is probably the best way any artist can work on a project.

You mentioned The Sowers of the Thunder. How heavily illustrated was that book as compared to what you're doing now? Is this project actually even more illustrated?

This evolved quite a bit from that original model. The Krenkel book is, for the most part, a collection of prior illustrations that he had done over the years which Donald Grant assembled and cobbled together to work within the text. As nice as some of those illustrations are, they are not always appropriate, or in other areas, they may be broad icons that work well with the text. But, no, the Solomon Kane project just grew and grew from all these little spot illustrations to contain full page illustrations. At first, color plates had never been considered, but somewhere along the line, we started looking at the Scribners classics that Wyeth had done and Schoonover, and well, one thing led to another, and there I was doing oil paintings aside from all the line drawings that we originally had agreed upon. So it grew. It's a bit like the Titanic movie. I don't know if it has gone over-budget, but it's definitely grown over time.

But that's the price you pay for a work in progress that was never written in stone from Day One. I can't think of too many books that are this heavily illustrated. When you're doing something so profusely illustrated, you run the risk of redundancy, so I've tried to be a little more creative in some areas. I suppose I also run the risk of editorializing some of Howard's narrative with my illustrations. They're not always illustrations of the passage, but they may be a comment on it from my own angle.

Can you give an example?

We'll have pirates planning something in a dark cellar, and maybe they're drinking. So I might do an illustration of a tankard of ale lying on its side, as if it has been upturned, and instead of wine running out of it, a skull and crossbones might be in the liquid running across the table. This is the sort of thing that comes from my newspaper days when I was doing a lot of editorial comments illustrations for newspaper articles.

There's another scene where Marylin, the captive in "The Moon of Skulls," is relating her story of woe to Kane and describes all the brushes with death she's had. I drew a couple of maidens dancing with skeletons.

These sort of things are aside from anything Howard has to add in the text. Some people might find that too much of a personal comment from me, but I think it's better than another head of Marylin.

You are saying that the artist lends something to the project. Don't good illustrators just do that, take a certain amount of license?

Very much so. All you have to do is look at some of the things by Wyeth. I think he's even made the comment—it may have come from Pyle—the idea of not just illustrating the text but trying to glean or mine some sort of underlying sense from the text. There's one scene where Davy Balfour is kidnapped leaving home, and Wyeth painted Davy's mother in the background crying, weeping in her apron. It is a great touch, but it's not in the text. That's the sort of thing that an imaginative reader, a good reader, would not necessarily need to see. Nevertheless, the artists delight in it. It makes a book a different experience if you have those sort of illustration.

I was arguing with a publisher a few years ago. I said I wanted to illustrate adult books or fantasy books. He said, "Well, you can forget it, because in our market, people today are sophisticated enough. They don't need pictures accompanying text in a book. I never agreed with that, because I know so many people—intelligent people, people who enjoy reading—who love a finely illustrated book and collect them. So I don't really buy that argument.

Do you think that the problem is that the publishers are not willing to take a chance because they have their own prejudices?

Somehow it's been lumped into the children's market. There's a sense that an illustrated book is for children. I like to think of myself as a fairly well-read and sophisticated reader, and all I have to do is look around here and everything I own is well-illustrated. That's not just speaking as an artist. I'm a fan of all that work myself, so I don't think that's right. I think there is a market for it, and maybe this book will set some sort of precedent for that.

Is there a contradiction in that people often don't read the book at all, but see the movie or watch the television series, either of which is a completely visual medium?

That's a very good point. I would daresay I agree with you. I've been guilty of that myself. But I don't think that's valid across the board, and that's why it's worth doing something up right to see if I can prove my point.

Is there a turning point in publishing when you stopped seeing illustrated books?

I think photography and—you mentioned it yourself—film changed the way we see things. Because of that, we're much more visual today, and we guess things quicker than maybe people did at the turn of the century. I don't want to denigrate anyone from the turn of the century, but we have more images flashed at us now and we're able to grasp what an African hillside looks like, or even a dragon for that matter, more so than we did in 1905. I hesitate to say that because people may have had more of an imagination then because they weren't force-fed so many images and they had to create these scenes in their own head. I also find that it's more difficult to be creative today because of the homogenization of visuals today. Everything's starting to look the same, and anything that is successful is copied, whether it's in movies or in the arts. That's a good point you raised there. That's worth a whole hour discussion between writers and artists themselves.

Of course, I'd be a strong proponent for the illustrated visual side of it, but I am sure there are people who would argue against it. I wish I could couch that in more of a firm, defining role, but I can't. I can see both sides of it. How's that for side-stepping.

In the midst of that answer, you raised another point. Because you're confronted with a barrage of images, it's more challenging for the illustrator now to come up with original images. I was looking, for example, at one of your sketches of this ancient jungle city. We've seen ancient jungle cities in books going back to Tarzan and so forth, but yet I did feel that you had added something original to that illustration. There was something in the way the buildings look. While the column in the picture was evocative of ancient Egypt or Persia, it's not exactly? What did you do to challenge yourself in that area and to keep fresh?

I did that illustration over four times. I used my wife as a barometer. I'd say what does this remind you of. She'd say, "that reminds me of Moorish North African architecture." Well, that'd go over my shoulder. Each time, I tried to synthesize a number of sources, but it wasn't as easy as just sitting down and drawing that. It required looking at Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian architecture, and trying to stay away from any conventions we use in the 1990s for that sort of thing. I wanted to get closer to the sources and then toss in some flights of fancy. Then hopefully you'll arrive at something that's unique. But it requires a bit of shutting down what we think of as ancient architecture because it's all prejudiced by what we've seen in other artists' work today.

This is a bit of a contradictory statement coming from an artist, but you have to stop looking at things around you and again rely on an inner sensibility to come up with anything that might be unique. That's a hard process to describe because now you're getting into the area of the evolution of the creative process. It's been tackled by many more brilliant minds than mine, and I can still walk away after reading things confused by all that. I don't know what else to tell you about something like that other than it's a lot of hard work, and then there's a point where you say I guess that's a little different. I always try to approach things with the idea in mind that, well, has anybody seen this before. If I can get a little bit of, well, I don't think that's been done before, then I know I've accomplished what I set out to do.

I'd like to go specifically to drawing the character of Solomon Kane and how you developed his look. While he doesn't bear an explicit resemblance to another character you've drawn, the Shadow, another pulp hero who has a very serious look and potentially a very strong nose, were there similarities in drawing these two characters? Did you perceive that while drawing Kane or not?

Well, the similarities there are obvious, yes. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've read Philip Jose Farmer's history of the family tree of Doc Savage, but somehow in that family tree, you'll find Solomon Kane is related to the Shadow. It's funny.

I've read Tarzan Alive.

It's similar to that. They're all connected. Somehow, for all those heroes throughout the centuries, he's managed to find some familial connection. So there are some similarities there. As a matter of fact, at first, I was worried about the similarities. Maybe it has something to do with my own nature and my own melancholy approach to things, but I empathize a bit with both of these characters. I think that's more of me coming out in those figures. It was something I tried to avoid, but I couldn't help but wind up with a sense that, yeah, I see a little bit of the Shadow in there. Both of them are vengeful embodiments of the human conscience, so there are some similarities there. I wouldn't be surprised if Maxwell Grant—I can't think of his real name at the moment—maybe even read some of the Kane books. I don't know if there was any influence there, but I think Kane would have come out a year or two before the Shadow—1928 or something like that. The Shadow might be '31. But that figure in a slouch hat was a common icon around that time for a mysterious figure.

Did you use a human or photographic model for Kane?

I'd rather not have [Kane] look like any one person. I'm trying to keep a bit of an iconographic feeling to him. I think that's a fault which I see in a lot of current illustration. I was in a bookstore the other day and there was a version of Treasure Island or Kidnapped and the characters in the book looked like models in costumes—they look liked, oh, real people. That's why certain artists like Wyeth and Frazetta idealize forms a little bit. These are people, but they aren't anyone specifically in the way that maybe Rockwell would have someone. He's another fine illustrator, but I like for the viewer to imbue the character with a little bit of a personality rather than my having him having an eyebrow or feature where they can say, oh, yeah, that's Erroll Flynn or Clint Eastwood or somebody like that. Those were two people we were thinking of in terms of faces that we liked, not necessarily that that would be Kane but faces that looked like heroic figures' faces. He's really a composite of a few different faces.

How long did it take you to develop his face?

The portrait I painted took me three and a half weeks, and I threw a lot of preliminary drawings over my shoulders. I dug some of them out the other day, and I shuddered when I looked at them because they were so far off from what I was trying to get. Again, it's something that evolved until I finally arrived at something that feels right. I never had to draw Kane's face until we were well into the project. Since I kept him in shadow at the beginning and in the long shots of the inkline drawings, we didn't see a finely detailed face. So I was able to skirt that issue. It was really a couple of months before I finally came up right against the problem of having to paint his portrait.

I didn't want him just to look like some dashing Erroll Flynn character because that's obviously not what Howard had in mind. He had a dour pallor, a long face. Kane isn't the sort of fictional character where you get inside of his head the way you might other people—Ahab or something. About the best I could do is get beside Kane—not inside him but beside him—and maybe walk along with him a bit. He's somebody I only know from a distance. As a reader, Howard hasn't given us enough to have a fully developed character to the point where we know what he's thinking. I can't imagine this guy having breakfast, for example, or sitting around enjoying a good laugh in a tavern. So when you have a character like that, he has to remain somewhat aloof, even in the illustrations.

I've always liked the old "Man With No Name" movies because we really never knew anything about that character. He just showed up at certain points, and he never seemed to do any work. There's a mystical quality that Solomon Kane also has. And the Shadow has that same quality. I remember when I was working with Michael Kaluta, he liked to say the Shadow isn't just a guy with a hat on. There's something more there, something almost ethereal, and Kane has this quality, too.

Did you read any notes or correspondence of Robert E. Howard when working on this project or did you just glean your inspiration from the stories themselves?

I was fortunate not to have any preconceived notions of Kane when I came to this project. I had never read any. I think that's worked to my advantage at least as far as arriving at anything that might be a little different from what has come before. No, I never had. I read the stories only after I decided to take the job. Well, I can't say that. It was a simultaneous thing. Once I saw the breadth and the scope of these stories and the emotional intensity of them, I just thought this would be great stuff to illustrate. It runs the gamut from the historical context setting and then the addition of fantasy elements and magic and vampires and harpies. It just seemed like such a perfect visual throughout the book.

But I understand there isn't a lot of correspondence with Howard commenting on Kane. He's made a few remarks. I'm by no means a Howard scholar. I came to a lot of his material later.

But at age 18, you drew Conan.

Yeah, I drew him but just for myself.

But why Conan? Why did you choose that particular character at that time?

It was probably about 1970, and Conan was the rage because of the Frazetta covers. I was buying the books for the covers, which, by the way—I guess we brought that point up earlier—art takes precedence over text. But I was buying the Howard Conan books because of the Frazetta covers. I was in high school, and I was attracted to it. Then I read it, but it was Conan and it was Frazetta that I think everyone was excited about at that time.

Did you feel that because you were excited by that at that time that there is some sort of closure in that now you're drawing a Robert E. Howard character?

It's a privilege to be part of the legacy of this canon of material. On the other hand, it's realizing some adolescent ambitions I had. Certainly, that. I've wanted to do these sort of things since I was 14, 15 years old. I always knew I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a comic artist back then, but I didn't find a niche in that industry until much later in my life. I remember showing professionals my work at [age] 18, and they thought it was too illustrative. I wasn't disappointed by that, but it sidetracked me into other areas. I think I drew my first comic when I was about 35. That's unusual for people in comics.

But you had been an illustrator and I read that you'd been a court reporter and a newspaper artist.

So I have a background that's a little different, and hopefully I will be able to use all that to my advantage now and maybe provide a different spin on things. I hope that's the case.

Did you ever happen to see the Solomon Kane comics that came out in the 1970s and 1980s?

No, I never saw any of those, and I even have some good friends who drew some of that stuff, but I never saw any of it until Marcelo had shown it to me well into the project. By that time when I saw it, I already knew what I wanted and how I saw this character.

Did he withhold it so it wouldn't influence you?

No, not at all. As a matter of fact, he thought he was being helpful by showing me as many different illustrations and versions of Kane. But none of that made any impression on me. Not that I thought it was bad; it was just, well, not the way I had seen him, because I came to it fresh.

Even the Jeff Jones covers to the Solomon Kane books are very nice, but I'd never seen them until I already knew how I envisioned him.

Let me just step away from the art for one moment and ask you about Robert E. Howard himself. Do you feel that he's an unrecognized talent among American authors? On one hand, you've got people like Jack London who wrote adventure stories and had some literary recognition, do you feel that Howard deserves something more than he's received from the mainstream?

Yes, I do, although I think it's very unfortunate that he died when he was 30. Whereas even London or Poe, for that matter, two writers who definitely have a high place in literature, at least they had a few more years to cultivate their craft. I think that is a big problem. We have these wonderful diamonds in the rough like Robert E. Howard, but because he died so young, there aren't too many authors who have really made a big impression by that time. Well, Hemingway obviously had a few hits under his belt. So did Fitzgerald. But then again, they also had fairly long lives. Well, not Fitzgerald, but they were able to put out other things.

And they had a chance to refine their style.

Yes. It's all a bit of a speculation. We only have this body of work here that is a little unsatisfying. Yet at the same time, I think we all have a fascination with an interesting life cut short. I think about Poe or Van Gogh or Mozart, for that matter. Well, they were geniuses. You wonder where these talents would have gone on to. Look at James Dean and John Lennon even—people who died fairly young, certainly before their time—we give them a certain amount of slack as far as what they ultimately would have gone on to do. We're optimistic about their lives.

James Dean only made three films. His fame is all based on three performances.

Yes, that's right. This may really be stretching it a bit, but you can take this all the way back to the life of Jesus Christ. There's someone who died when he was 33, and even that, we might all speculate on what would have occurred had he lived any longer. There's a fascination with people who haven't lived very long lives. As a matter of fact, I have a story in the back of my head that I want to do with that idea in mind. I guess I'm really getting off the point now.

Here's a point I'd like to make that has some bearing on the project. I'm also interested by the historical context of these stories. I enjoy the fact that they're set in a fairly definite time period. The Howard scholars have managed to pinpoint Kane's life relatively speaking from 1540 to some time in the early 17th century, 1610 or something like that. But when you think of the wealth of new ideas and exploration and the political and the religious turmoil of that time, what a wonderful setting that is for a character like this. Then we add the elements of magic and fantasy onto it. I just find it very exciting and satisfying, not only as a good read, but also as a chance for some good artwork to be attached to it. I really enjoy trying to place the character in an environment that we're somewhat familiar with, like an English tavern, for example, or maybe the galley of a ship, and put enough factual research into it that it's firmly planted in reality. Then when you throw in the harpies and crawling hands, they're much more of a surprise because we certainly don't expect that in this world.

[Kane] was born shortly after Magellan's ships circumnavigated the globe. Michelangelo would still have been alive when he was born. So there's all this great environment for him to be traveling through. I really like all that extra texture to these stories. Howard will hint at it; he doesn't get into it very heavily. By no means do I want to turn this into a history lesson, but I just like the whole stage setting here. I enjoy doing research, too. That's another big part of this thing. I didn't just draw these things out of my head.

Even the weapons for that matter. The firearm had just been invented. [But] they were not those pirate flintlocks of the 17th or 18th century. They were these huge strange mechanical devices called wheel locks. If you took one of those guns and put it in a Star Wars film, everyone would be saying, oh, what a great-looking weird weapon. That is, what an alien sense it has to it. But these were things had just been invented back then, so they had this very almost clumsy, mechanical quality. You'd almost think they'd blow up in your hand if you fired one. I like the idea of adding these sort of things to the stories.

That's a whole different aside from the mood and the characters themselves—the inventions of the day. If [Howard] would have written more of these stories, he could have mined all that historical background even further.

In the essays and letters collected in Glenn Lord's biobibliography of Howard, The Last Celt, Howard talks a lot about his own love of reading history.

Well, that man must've had quite an imagination. I don't think he ever ventured much further than Cross Plains, Texas. Getting back to what we were talking about before, people had to rely a little bit more on their imagination back then. They weren't passively receiving visuals over television, so there was more of a fertile ground for ideas. Ideas are pretty much just handed to us now. I look at my own children. They have access to so many things on television and the computer. I wonder how that ultimately will affect their creative process. Maybe I'm already talking like some old dinosaur.

Are you excited about helping expose Kane to a younger audience who might not have experienced it before?

This is funny. There was a day at my daughter's preschool where they wanted the parents to drop in and tell the children what they do. I brought in a few things. The children were all sitting kneeling around at my feet there, and I asked what they liked to draw. Of course, all these power mutant rangers, ninja turtles, Disney characters like Pooh and such, and Batman, of course. But one kid yelled out—and he didn't know who he was—I love pirates! And I thought, now, there's a kid after my own heart. I'm glad to see that there is still a little room along all that high tech stuff for that sort of archaic attraction. Hopefully, they'll be generations to come that will still be into all this stuff.

Something that I tried to do was to bring in some character that maybe Robert E. Howard only hinted at. For example, there's a scene in "Wings of the Night" where the villagers are out in the fields. These people are basically fodder for the end of the story, but I tried to bring some sense of humanity to them. One of my favorite illustrations actually is a baby suckling at the breast of a woman sitting out in a field, and there's another woman harvesting the crops. An illustration like that is not the kind of thing you normally associate with Howard, and I can't think of too many people who have done illustrations like that But at the end of this book, these harpies are carrying away babies and there's mass destruction of this whole village. I think it's poignant to play up the human side of this. Again, I run the risk of altering the visceral—at that time, mindlessness—of the action, but, well, that's the way I approached it.

We were talking about the old generation of fans and the ones that are yet to come. I would like to produce a book here that may stand the test of time as far as in 20 or 30 years, somebody could pick this thing up and say, oh, this is a very classically, traditionally illustrated book. It doesn't look like it's rooted in the 1990s when it was done. I tried to stay away from some of the trendy techniques, things that might pinpoint when it was actually produced. That way, maybe it'll always have some merit, like the old Harryhausen films, the old Thief of Baghdad. They have certain qualities to them because the people really cared about what they were doing. They put a lot of thought into it, and hopefully this book will have that same feel.