THE
WILDCLAW DAVE DORMAN INTERVIEW
Tuesday, June 13, 2008
Interviewer: Charlie Athanas
"Some people can be very specific on having the likenesses exactly like they are in the film. Some don’t care as long as it has the feeling of the characters. I particularly like to have the portrayal of the characters that I do look very much like they do in the film."
"There
are a number of horrific elements involved in this. There are zombies.
There are flesh-eating androids. There is a bacteria that is causing
people to turn into psychic zombies and there’s a whole drug
sub-culture that is killing surfers. It’s a surf drug culture
that turns them into crazy, surf-addicted killers."
CHARLIE: Here we are at another WildClaw Theatre interview and this time we are talking to Dave Dorman. For 25 years, Dave has been illustrating globally recognized properties like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, and Aliens, as well as, creating his own worlds, like Wasted Lands. Welcome, Dave.
DAVE: Thank you very much for having me.
C: It’s great; it’s good to talk to you. You have a wide variety of work in illustration, but we would like to focus on the horror aspect, being as how we’re a horror theatre.
D: Okay.
C: I understand you’ve done some work with Clive Barker in the comic book world. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
D: Yeah, I’ve done a little bit of work with him. Not directly, but he was involved and I have spoken with him on a number of occasions. I did a story for the Hellraiser comic book that Marvel/Epic put out a few years back. The story in particular that I did was written by Peter Atkins who wrote the screenplays for the Hellraiser stories, Parts II, III, and IV, I believe, under the direction of Clive. Peter had known Clive for quite a number of years prior to that, so it was very fun working with Peter and having him tell stories about Clive when they were younger. It was a lot of fun. Peter probably knows just as much about Hellraiser as anybody else from working under Clive, so it was great fun to do that project. I did a cover for Epic magazine that featured hmm… I’m drawing a blank on the characters…
C: Pinhead?
D: No, it was The Breed.
C: Nightbreed?
D: Yes, Nightbreed. So I did a picture of them, the main characters, sort of traveling through the desert in their old Cadillac that was just stained with blood on the front from them just massacring whom they were running over in the wilds of the open prairie. It was a very fun piece to do.
C: Do they give you a lot of reference photos for this? These are really well known characters.
D: I did get a little bit of reference from the companies, but mainly it’s just me digging around finding pictures from books and magazines and taking still frames from videos and stuff like that. Some people can be very specific on having the likenesses exactly like they are in the film. Some don’t care as long as it has the feeling of the characters. I particularly like to have the portrayal of the characters that I do look very much like they do in the film. So I strive to have a little bit more realism to what I do.
C: Right. Well sticking with the movie world I understand that you also worked with Stuart Gordon on the Re-Animator work.
D: Well, once again, that’s sort of a byproduct of working with the companies to do the artwork. I did not work specifically with Stuart, although it was his film obviously, I did not meet him until after I had done the cover for the laserdisc of Re-Animator. Subsequently it was a comic book cover for a Re-Animator adaptation. During a film festival in Florida, just a few years ago, I had a chance to meet him, sit down, and we had breakfast and talked and he turned out to be a great fan of my work, which was a nice surprise. We talked about artwork and horror and films. It was just a lot of fun and it’s one of the benefits of the type of work that I do, being media related, is sometimes I’m not involved at all with the creators of the original product. I’m being hired by a company to do an advertising piece or a product cover, or such, but through the mechanisms of the way this business works you do eventually get to meet the people who are the creators. So it was real fun to sit down with Stuart and just have a very casual breakfast. And we’ve met over the years again at places and he just a wonderful man. A very creative person and has a very razor sharp violent streak in him too, which is very cool. (Laughter)
C: And hopefully none of that came out at breakfast.
D: No, no. The only cutting that was done was on the bread.
C: Let’s go to another horror classic. You won an Eisner Award for your work on the Aliens/Tribes graphic novel. So, here we are again, working on the H. R. Giger monster. So was that fun or intimidating?
D: It was a little bit intimidating, because the creature is so unique in it’s design and it’s horrifying appearance that I was hopefully going to capture some of that in what I was doing in the artwork for the illustrated novel. Unfortunately I don’t have the benefit of real time that movies do, so I can’t sort of pace myself to anticipate an upcoming image, because the image is printed right there on the page. You see it when you see it. So I can’t do the same things that are done in film in my single printed image. I have to approach it in a different fashion. It was very intimidating trying to capture the feel of the horror and gruesomeness of that character and its surroundings and involvement in the story in static artwork. And I think I did because obviously the novel won an award for what it was and for my artwork in it. The fans really loved it. I really enjoyed doing it. It was great fun; especially since the fans of the Alien creatures liked my portrayal of the creatures themselves in the book. So, I achieved what I set out for in that.
C: Excellent. Let’s talk about some of your own personal work. What can you tell us about Wasted Lands with its plagues and zombies and Cadaver Dogs? What can you tell us about that?
D: The Wasted Lands is a fun project that I’ve been developing over the past couple of years and it’s just an amalgamation of all the same things that I sort of like in films and books and comics and all sorts of media. I just put them in a blender and mixed them up and created this story of this fella who is trying to search for his own identity, as well as, saving the world. There are a number of horrific elements involved in this. There are zombies. There are flesh-eating androids. There is a bacteria that is causing people to turn into psychic zombies and there’s a whole drug sub-culture that is killing surfers. It’s a surf drug culture that turns them into crazy, surf-addicted killers.
C: (Laughter)
D: It’s really sort of crazy in its mix of horror, adventure, and science fiction, and classic Sergio Leone westerns. All of that. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on there. Visually there are some pretty ugly creatures. There’s decay and nastiness going on. Absolutely.
C: So if somebody wanted to read Wasted Lands where could they find it?
D: There is a website, WastedLands.com. If you go there you get an overview of the characters and the world and there is a graphic novel called, Rail, which I drew and created. I have a writing partner, Del Stone, who is an award-winning horror fiction writer. He helped me with the dialog and such. He has also written three novels based in the Wasted Lands universe which you’ll get information for on the Wasted Lands site. One has been published called, The Uninvited, which is a sort of science fiction/horror adventure. And there are two more serialized stories that are on the website if you search hard enough.
C: (Laughter)
D: There will be clickable icons where you can see the other two. One’s called, A Thousand Angry Teeth, and the other one is called, How To Skin A Jack. Jack is one of the characters in the universe. There’s plenty to read on the website.
C: Excellent. So I want to talk about one last thing before we wrap up. I understand you have a couple of instructional DVD’s from the Gnomon Workshop out in California that have just come out. What can you tell us about those?
D: Well, I’ve had quite a number of people come to me asking how I do my work, how I approach my paintings, and what techniques do I use. So Gnomon, which is a school in Los Angeles that teaches up-and-comers in the videogame and film business how to do animation and graphics - computer graphics for that media - they’ve decided to branch out into traditional media, which is what I use. Oil paints, acrylics, watercolors and such. They asked me to do an instructional video on how I approach a piece of artwork. What I’ve done is two different videos. One is preparing the illustration for painting, which is doing my preliminary work, my sketches, my pencil drawing, my finished pencil drawing, and getting everything ready before I put the paint on. That’s the first DVD. The second DVD is taking that drawing and then painting it, basically. In combination, the two DVD’s show you my complete way of going from a blank piece of paper and a blank board to a fully finished, completed oil painting illustration.
C: So, in other words, if I watch these DVD’s at the end of watching them I will be able to illustrate just like you. (Laughter)
D: You will be able to paint exactly like me and there will be a million Dave Dorman clones out there and hopefully everyone will be sending me royalties from painting exactly like me and I’ll be able to retire.
C: There, that’s the only news that we wanted to hear. (Laughter)
D: Perfect.
C: Thanks for your time, Dave. It’s been great. We look forward to seeing you in San Diego this July.
D: My pleasure. If people want to go to my website, DaveDorman.com, there’s some clickable links and you can see some of the artwork we’ve talked about. There’s plenty of stuff there, not just horror – science fiction, comic books, media-related stuff, some humor stuff. There’s a lot there. Its just DaveDorman.com.
C: Very good. All right, well again, thank you Dave. We’ll talk to you again soon.
D: My pleasure, thank you very much!
All artwork © Dave Dorman
© 2008
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