Once home from my first big convention, I soon went over to my friend Tim Foster’s house, to show him my latest work and tell him about my adventures in San Diego. I especially wanted to tell him about my time with Sam Kieth, since he and Sam were friends, and he basically gave me an in for an introduction.
While we’re visiting, his phone rings. He answers it and says, “Oh hi, Sam. Chris Wisnia’s here, and we were just talking about you.” Tim hands me the phone and says Sam wants to talk to me. Naturally this really excites me.
Sam opens up the conversation telling me he doesn’t really have any clout with publishers or editors, but if there was ever anything he could do to help me, he’d be happy to do it. And he gave me his work and home phone numbers, and that’s how my relationship with Sam began.
Over the next year or so, I would occasionally call and see how he was doing, and this usually resulted in hour-long phone calls. He was always real sociable and friendly, whenever I caught him on the phone.
He talked about how unhappy he was with his Sandman comics, even though in a lot of ways, those are the books he’s known for and got him going. When he drew them, he was a huge Berni Wrightson fan, and was going for a Berni Wrightson look. But his inker, Mike Dringenberg, a very talented artist, had an apparently different vision, and the work ended up looking different than Sam had envisioned. Sam felt he didn’t belong on a fantasy book anyways.
As time passed on, during our phone calls, he would be working on different projects. We would talk about his art in the Hulk and Wolverine mini-series. He would tell me story ideas he was putting into the sequel of Zero Girl, or the big plot twists in it or Four Women or Hulk/Wolverine. But I would read his comics, and I’d realize that often the things he would bring up seemed so incidental or peripheral to me. The concerns he felt strongly about, at least strongly enough to talk about, I may not have noticed in his stories, if he hadn’t mentioned them to me. I don’t know if it was just because he didn’t want to spoil the main ideas, or if he was so advanced beyond thinking about them that he wasn’t interested in them anymore.
He would talk about how every artist comes up with styles and shortcuts for drawings, and Sam has his own techniques for drawing his art, and it’s not necessarily better or worse, it’s just what we learn works. It can be a curse according to him, because you have trouble getting out of what you know, and your art becomes stylized.
When I was sending out invitations to my wedding, I went over to Tim’s house again. And Sam was there to take photos of Tim, which he planned to use as reference for his Hulk/Wolverine book. He had photocopies of Four Women that he showed us, and he hadn’t decided on the order of pages yet. Tim made some suggestions for narrative, and Sam wound up mixing up the order of the pages for the final draft. I remember thinking how foreign this style of writing was to me, that Sam could change the order of events, and the story would still work. With my own work, I thoroughly wrote out my scripts, panel for panel, usually completely in order, from start to finish, without jumping around. I completed the script before even considering drawing any lines to paper.
Sam wrote in images, not words. He knows these two people are going to see each other in this place, and then get in an argument, and this person will be upset and go do this. But what they actually say, maybe it’s not as important to Sam as what they do. Once the images are finished, he puts conversations into the mouths of the images.
He talked about working for DC’s Wildstorm imprint (with Zero Girl and Four Women), but getting a couple other companies interested in doing a more artsy, independent book he had in mind. And he was shopping it around a little, primarily to Top Shelf, and the companies wanted a proposal, an outline, a script. But Sam was telling them, look, I’ve done that my whole career, and I’m not interested in that anymore. If you want to work with me, this time we’ll work how I want to work. And that means, I’m going to do my book the way I want to do it. I’m not going to give you a script, or a plot, for us to discuss before continuing on. I’m going to start drawing and you can see the pages as I go, and I’ll do the script last of all, and you can publish it or not publish it. And the smaller companies just wanted to work with him, and he was trying to decide which company would be best for his book.
Sam talked about how personal a lot of events in his stories are. How artists have to come up with their stories somewhere, and eventually we all steal from people we know, their experiences, their stories. And at one point his wife told him, Look, I understand that that’s how an artist works, and you have to tell your stories. But with this particular story he was putting together, Sam was invading into her stories. It went beyond telling his own stories. He was taking stories that were so personal, they weren’t his to tell. They finally decided, he was allowed to tell stories that he was a part of, but not stories that she told him, from when he wasn’t around. In other words, if she’s part of his story, then that justifies it being his story too. It’s a fine line, finding stories. Woody Allen makes films about this very subject, of pissing all your friends and family off, estranging yourself from them, because you’re stealing their lives from them to tell a story. But what a story!
While Sam was struggling trying to get his movies put together, he talked a little about Neil Gaiman. Neil wanted to get into literature, so he started writing books, and he became really successful at that, and then he decided he wanted to do films, and now he’s getting into that. And Neil gets all this critical attention, whatever he does, in whatever field. And Sam’s and Neil’s careers both kind of kicked in with Sandman, but even though Sam is popular and successful, he never really got awards or recognition for his work, except for early early in his career, when he inked Matt Wagner’s Mage comics. He was nominated best inker, or best new inker, something like that. But ever since then, he hasn’t been honored with any nominations or awards, and now he’s been going for twenty years, and he thinks, it would be nice to get some recognition sometime. I assume all artists feel this way, because we all work awfully hard, and it would be nice if all that hard work could be acknowledged in some way.
Once we talked about how fans sometimes take liberties and act like they know you, but it can be a little frightening. They’re so intimately familiar with your work, that in a way, they do kind of know you. I think about this when I read someone’s autobiography, or listen for long periods to their radio show. You get to know them, and they become a part of your everyday life. But they don’t know you at all. You’re a stranger, and they probably have very little interest in getting to know you, or seeing who you are. Sam has to worry about people like this if they get too close. If they get hold of his phone number or address, for example. Probably nothing would ever come of it, but you just don’t know people, and you don’t know what crazy fan with a gun will think of you the way they thought of John Lennon. It’s really a strange dynamic.
I think what we tended to talk about most, though, is the frustrations Sam experiences, being pegged as a mainstream comics artist, when he isn’t that interested in doing mainstream work. He’s known for his superhero work, and got his reputation and fan base from his superhero work, but he really just wants to do his personal, psychological, relationship-issue stories. Even his famous books, the art was always on the fringe side of mainstream, where people were telling him he was too weird, and he had to be more mainstream. So on the mainstream side, people don’t feel his stories really belong. But now he’s trying to get out of the mainstream, and all the indie publishers are telling him, “Look, you’re a mainstream artist. You do Wolverine and Spider-Man.” Sam said it almost felt like they wouldn’t give him indie credibility. How dare he try and pretend he’s cool and hip and indie. He’s a superhero artist. So Sam felt like he was having trouble on either side of the fence. And in that respect, I think he could relate to what I was trying to do as an artist, and I suspect that’s why he didn’t mind me calling him like a fanboy and bugging him every now and then.