Spike : The Devil You Know

So Spike has his own comic. Maybe some of you reprobates have heard of it? It’s called Spike: The Devil You Know. The first issue came out last week (buy it) and it’s host to the man himself plus our mysterious blue demon boy, Eddie Hope. It’s written by Bill Williams, whom you know and drawn by a man who you may not: artist Chris Cross. We thought it would be a crime to let the lack of association stand and so, without further ado, our interview (completely unfiltered) with Chris Cross.

Buffyfest: You’ve been in the business for a while. How did you get into comics?

Chris Cross: Not just a while, heh… almost 20 years! And I’m just getting started! Time flies. I got into comics during my tenure in the School of Visual Arts In Manhattan in the nineties. An old friend of mine named Brian Marshall told me of a company that was looking for new talent to do some of their books by the name of Milestone Media… a new upstart African-American owned publication and they looked to be ready to turn the market on its ear by producing some books that recognized the cultures of the characters that would be prime focus on the books themselves.

I had gotten a couple of pages of art published in small press up to that point and I was busy taking up animation and painting in SVA among other things, and I wanted to get into the medium as soon as possible. So I got my work and set up an interview with the office manager Christine Gilliam in the Milestone offices during one of my breaks in-between classes. And after a few funny shenanigans that happened, I wound up getting work from Milestone. And the rest, they say, is history. So, Kiddies, when there’s an opportunity, go get it!

Buffyfest: What comics have inspired you as an artist?

Chris Cross: Well, that’s way too exhaustive a list. I think the first book that got me wanting to draw comics was X-MEN 121. After I saw that book, I was hooked. Comics were hard to come by in my neighborhood and a kid I knew had stacks of them. And he pulled out The Uncanny X-men 121 and I must have read that thing 5 times in one sitting and just stared at the art. I had never seen anything like that.

So that’s when the hunger started. After that, I was a John Byrne/Terry Austin nut, then graduated to Jack Kirby… going backwards in time and then forward to Neal Adams…. And everyone else after that. Then I discovered Manga and then it was over. My friend, Buzz, a great artist in his own right, introduced me to the world of Ma Wing Shing in the early nineties…. or Wing Shing Ma in his country, and I had more to absorb. No one has caught up to that brother yet. And there’s a ton of European artists that inspire me also. So there’s a plethora of inspiration to drag and fuel from. You can guess that my mind is never at rest with all of that zooming in front of me. I, like most artists, have this fear of growing stale, so I inundate myself with tons of new material weekly. So I’m always looking to let my work evolve to the next level. Never happy with it, but I sometimes get a chuckle when it does something I never expected.

Buffyfest: Tell us a little bit about your technique. Do you prefer drawing character stuff, backgrounds?

Chris Cross: My technique. I think you can’t just decide if you’re a true storyteller, if you prefer characters to backgrounds. I like to say to myself that the backgrounds are as much a character as the characters themselves. You can’t have mood or juxtaposition in storytelling if there are no backgrounds. They sell the story. Sure, you can have flashy costumes and great faces, boobs and booty in slinky outfits.. but if you can’t draw a car or a building, why are you drawing sequential art in the first place? Even if it’s a box with holes in it and some round circles for wheels, It has to fit in the context of the art and the style in which you’re telling the story. My friends tell me that my work is American manga. I’m cool with that! A lot of people think that Japanese manga is full of big eyes, small mouths and limited expression… but these guys really know anatomy. And you have to know anatomy in order to distort it or to caricature. And you can never discount the Japanese artist’s ability to do great backgrounds. But I also learned a great deal from European artists such as Mobius, Brian Bolland, and others. I also buy and search out tons of architectural reference. A cityscape or a dystopia or a galactic sprawl has to have a definitive look to pull off why characters are what they are and do what they do. It’s as much the behavior as the character’s behavior. It can tell why the character chooses to rebel or why that character chooses to protect and add to that area’s greatness. It’s all about what the writer intends and what I can pull out of his/her head and mix it with my vision. Otherwise, it’s incomplete.

Buffyfest: How did you get the Spike comic gig?

Chris Cross: I had a hole in my schedule and I was looking for something different to get my hands into. And the Spike gig was open. Seems I keep getting these vampire assignments lately…. LOL.

Anywho, The world of Joss Whedon has a rich environment and I’m really surprised that it translates so well to comics. And the cool thing is that I did the first Angel cover that kicked off the series and full circle, I’m doing one of the minis. It’s a lot of fun, and tedious at times with all the reference I’m trying to use at my command… sometimes there’s such thing as TOO much ref….but I’m doing my best to make it more than just a vampire book. And I hope I’m achieving it.

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http://buffyfest.blogspot.com/2010/06/buffyfest-interviews-spike-devil-you.html