Jesse: Welcome to The Illustrator’s Studio. I am Jesse Kowalski, Curator of Exhibitions at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Illustrator’s Studio is a weekly interview series, a project of the Museum’s Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies.

One of the modern fantasy masters, Charles Vess began his career drawing for Heavy Metal magazine and National Lampoon. He soon found work at Marvel comics and later DC comics. Along the way he met author Neil Gaiman, with whom Vess has collaborated many times. At the World Fantasy Awards in 1991, Vess and Gaiman won the award for Best Short Story for their work on the Sandman comic book. Vess went on to win Best Artist at the World Fantasy Awards in 1999, 2010 and 2014. And I am thrilled to speak with him today. Welcome Charles.

Charles: Thanks for having me.

Jesse: Looking through photographs of your studio, I see a lot of references to illustration. In a quick glance, I saw Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips and Miyazaki figures, Astro Boy, and a doll of Koko The Clown from the Fleischer brothers. So I was just wondering what kinds of things inspired you growing up?

Charles: Well… once I got to college, I discovered Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and all those great illustrators. Although in college, I was in fine arts and they definitely looked down their noses at narrative art. And if you put a figure in there, they started laughing you out of the class. So once I got out of school, I started working in animation. So I’ve always been aware of the various things that happen in animation.

And I fell in love with Miyazaki after the first time I saw “My Neighbor Totoro,” and saw it in Japanese. No subtitles, but you could figure out sort of the story and just loved it. Discovered Swedish illustrator, John Bauer. And there’re so many others.

I love, it’s sort of like Sherlock Holmes looking after clues and finding some artists, that mentioned some other artists and then you go looking for them. It used to be a lot harder when there was no internet. There weren’t even art books in 1970, they just didn’t have them. So it was much harder then. You’d see one little picture in a magazine and go, “Oh, I want more.” But where would you go? So it’s a little easier nowadays.

Jesse: Yeah. I remember in college, illustration was treated the same for me. They kind of skipped through it and went straight to Abstract Expressionism.

Charles: My school was totally into Abstract Expressionism.

Jesse: Do you see a difference between fine art and illustration or do you consider yourself a fine artist or an illustrator, or do you consider them the same?

Charles: It depends on what I’m doing. I’m always a romantic artist, and always a narrative artist. I love to tell stories. Actually, my favorite thing is to do a painting that will imply a story, but is not connected to any particular one. And hopefully each viewer will make up their own story. And that’s a really fun thing to think about. And to me that is fine art, but if you’re illustrating Spider-Man as I did or some other kind of work-for-hire character then, it’s definitely illustration, but you try to infuse it with as much of your own personal input as possible.

Jesse: You mentioned the influence of Arthur Rackham. And I also see a lot of Czechoslovakian artist Alphonse Mucha in your work. And Brian Froud and Ruth Sanderson are some of the contemporary artists, I also see in your work. And I was wondering what artists today do you look to?

Charles: I’m always looking my… When I moved to New York city. I shared an apartment with Michael Kaluta for 12 years. And he was a fabulous artist, sometimes a little crazy, but good, good crazy. And all the stories you could tell! But any particular modern artist, Jean-Baptiste Monge is really fun. Makes me excited. Usually, it’s just the art that makes my fingers itch and makes me want to run to the drawing board and start drawing. That’s what I like. And there’s quite a few of them. I like Ruth’s and Brian’s work… Alan Lee. I’ve known them both, Alan and Brian since 1982, maybe.

Jesse: Yeah. And did you go to school for illustration or is it something…?

Charles: Well, I thought I was. I went into commercial art, but the school I went to…commercial art for them was teaching you how to do hand paste-up and design ads. And the thought of four years of hand paste-up was not something I was going to stay sane doing. So I switched into fine art, painting and printmaking. Specializing in printmaking, lithography, and that kind of thing. And it was, trying to be as subversive as possible. Again, I couldn’t use narrative, but I use a lot of my love of George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” cartoons, with strange landscapes and things happening.

Jesse: What was your first illustration job?

Charles: Something in the ’70s, local stuff. Once I moved to New York city, which had been 1976, actually almost my first job there was… Kaluta knew a lot of other comic artists. And one of them, Walt Simonson, was hired to do illustrations for Abrams books, which was a big art house publisher. But they’re doing an edition of “The Hobbit” using illustrations by the Rankin and Bass animation that came out at that time.

But that didn’t cover all the text. So they were getting artists to draw in that style and they had six or seven of us doing it. We were not allowed to sign the pictures, but if you ever see that big book of “The Hobbit” that’s based on the Rankin and Bass, all the paintings of the barrels, that’s mine.

Jesse: So I mentioned you work at Heavy Metal magazine. So a number of great illustrators worked there in the ’70s, Jean Moebius Giraud, Howard Chaykin, Bill Stout, Mike Kaluta, Richard Corben, Alex Nino, Jim Burns, Joe Jusko… I mean, you know a stellar cast. So what was it like working with those great artists?

Charles: Well, you didn’t really work with the artists you worked with the editor, who was just picking the art. I did a lot of… a number of pieces for them until finally the editor took me aside and went, “Charles, your work is just too nice for us.” They wanted a little more vicious, a little more misogynist, that kind of thing. And that was not something I was interested in doing. So luckily for me, Epic Illustrated came along and I started doing work for Archie Goodwin over at Marvel.

Jesse: Yeah. I found a self-portrait you did for either National Lampoon or Heavy Metal. Yeah. Were you thinking of Rockwell’s Triple Self-Portrait when you did that?

Charles: No, I was just trying to make some money and if it was my choice, I would never have been to science fiction but they wanted some science fiction. So I tried to draw space ships. I’m really bad at spaceships.

Jesse: So you brought up Epic Illustrated. So in 1981, you wrote and illustrated a story titled “Children of the Stars” that was published in Epic Illustrated, number eight, which was an adult fantasy comic book that Marvel published. And in 1987, Dark Horse Comics reprinted the story and others in a series titled “The Book of Night.” So what was the response to the release of the “Children of the Stars” in 1981?

Charles: A muted silence. Again, it didn’t have… The women’s legs weren’t long enough and the breasts weren’t big enough. And there weren’t enough people being chopped up. I was always more for lyrical and whimsical and poetic. And that was not quite the audience that usually read Epic Illustrated or Heavy Metal. So it took a long time to find my audience, shall we say. And segueing from that into superheroes, which is a very odd thing for me. I loved reading Spider-Man and Fantastic Four and all those things growing up, but I never thought I would draw them, and being asked to do, I think the first story I did for Marvel proper was a Doctor Strange story.

And then later on, I got connected to Spider-Man, which was fine because I grew up thinking, reading Spider-Man, loving it. I did gymnastics in high school thinking about Spider-Man, then you’re living in New York city and there’s all this cool architecture way up there in the tops of the buildings. And you’re like, “Oh, if you could just swing up there and look at it, it would be great.” So, when I was drawing Spider-Man I let all that love come out.

Jesse: Yeah. So, bringing up Spider-Man. So you painted the cover of the debut issue of the Web of Spider-Man series in ’85. And I think I told you before, that was one of my favorite comic books growing up. And I still have several issues in fact, I have this cover here. Signed, “Vess.” And then in 1990 you wrote and illustrated a graphic novel, Spider-Man: Spirits of the Earth in which Peter Parker travels to Scotland and encountered spirits and ghosts and an evil cult. And I was wondering, that seems more of your style with the fairies and things. Was that your idea? Or was that Marvel’s idea?

Charles: Definitely my idea. I woke up one morning with the idea in my head and I wrote it down and submitted it, and they agreed to do it. It’s probably been a whole lot. And it was… I got to write off several trips to Scotland, because of that. And just, I loved that landscape and I didn’t want to be drawing 10 million windows in New York City for the year…year and a half I worked on the book. So I would much rather draw a landscape and it did pretty well, sold well, and the royalties from that… Excuse me, it’s Marvel…the incentives from that helped us buy a house, our first house.

Jesse: Oh that’s good.

Charles: Yay, Spider-Man!

Jesse: Yeah. I mentioned you have a long working relationship with fantasy author Neil Gaiman, so I was wondering, when did you first meet and how did you get started working together?

Charles: So it’s a little complicated. There used to be a magazine called Amazing Heroes. And they came up with the idea of doing a swimsuit issue every summer. Wherein they asked all the artists that drew comics to do, scantily clad women, superheroes, mutants, whatever. And it sold really well for them. And they asked me and I went, “Ha! What will I come up with?” So I did this, I was doing Warriors Three, the story book, Asgardian Warriors Three at the time. But I love a British, actually a Virginian writer, James Branch Cabell. And he has this hilarious story where Jurgen, his hero, has been told by his mother to go out in the world and make a fine figure of himself. And he’s dense enough to think that he’s supposed to actually sculpt a figure of himself. So every time he gets caught into a pile of mud he’s always sculpting a fine figure of himself.

So I used that idea with Volstagg and The Warriors Three and said, “Thank you” to James Branch Cabell. And the editors of the magazine thought that I was talking about an older illustrator and that’s what they said underneath of it. And then in the next issue, there was a letter from Mr. Neil Gaiman of England saying, “Excuse me, but James Branch Cabell…” and he explained who he was and who was quite famous at the time. And he was one of the first writers taken before the Supreme Court for obscenity. And the obscenity is, I mean, you read it now and you’re like…it’s hard to imagine that you’d think it was obscene. So when we met at San Diego Comic-Con in one of the aisles, whenever that was ’88 or ’89. It was before Neil was “Neil.” So we could stand in the aisle and no one would bother him. We just started talking immediately about James Branch Cabell. And then he asked me if I wanted to draw an issue of Sandman. And the rest is history, I suppose.

Jesse: So in 1991, you worked on Sandman, number 19, based on Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And that book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story that year, the only comic book to ever win that award. And I understand that after that, there was a little bit of controversy perhaps, where they decided that comic books didn’t belong in that category, that they belonged in a category by itself.

Charles: Well, they just didn’t want comics in there. They just changed the rules. They didn’t say, “You can’t have a comic.” They said, “A short story is this many words…” And it sort of guaranteed that comics were going to be in that. The evening that we won that award was the evening that Neil came back from another party and found me. And we walked out into the desert and talked about Stardust for the very first time. Which was a big project.

Jesse: You were named Best Artist at the World Fantasy Awards three times. Other artists who have won the award include Tim Hildebrandt, Jeff Jones, Michael Whelan, Don Maitz, Edward Gorey, Greg Manchess, and Frank Frazetta, and others. And I believe Michael Whelan and Shaun Tan are the only other artists who won three times?

Charles: You know, I never counted.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s what I wondered. Do major awards like this inspire you, or you always just thinking about the next project?

Charles: Well, they’re fun. You look up on your mantle, see these awards. And they’re really the World Fantasy Awards are particularly ugly, but wonderful. It’s sort of bizarre manner and you put hats on them and do all these things. It was sculpted by Gahan Wilson in a portrait of H.P. Lovecraft in the style of an Easter Island statue. They’re quite unique. But they don’t do them anymore, they’ve redesigned the statue. But all of those awards, they’re fun to win. Once you get back to your drawing board, it’s still you and the drawing board and the blank sheet of paper that you have a war with.

Jesse: Yeah. So you mentioned working on Stardust with Neil. So that’s a modern fairy-tale set in England in the early 1800s. The book won several awards and in 2007, it was made into a feature film with Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Claire Danes. So I was wondering what involvement, if any, did you have with the motion picture. And when you were working on the book, did you expect that Hollywood would want to produce it?

Charles: It was optioned several times, before it became a movie. At one point Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were going to be the stars. There was another time when… various actresses wanted to be Stardust, and none of it ever happened. The only involvement I had with the movie was accepting a very large check and cashing it. Neil made sure my name was on the screen because he felt like the book would not have happened without my art. And without that collaboration. So Hollywood was perfectly willing to completely ignore my contribution, but he insisted on it. So it happened.

And I got to go to the premieres, and walk the carpets and see all the actors. I even went to Pinewood and watched them film some for a weekend and got to meet Michelle Pfeiffer. She was in her hag outfit and she never got out of that. She was always crunched and looking up like this, but apparently she had taken a number of years off to raise some children. And she’d also been taking art classes and trying to learn how to paint. So we had this lovely conversation about art and what it’s like to create things with this strange hag. It was so surreal, but fun.

Jesse: So what is your process for creating a painting from start to finish?

Charles: Well, an eraser, a pencil and an eraser. I think the eraser is the most important tool you’ll ever have in your life. You should always be able to change your mind. And I have a sturdy piece of paper and I start drawing on it, scribbling. And then I erase a lot and scribble. I yell at the walls, I throw things at the walls, not always but sometimes.

And then you come up with the piece that is sort of based on what was in your mind, but it’s usually different. And I will outline those pencil drawings with an ink line and then wash over that with color and in a week or so later, there’ll be a finished piece, if I’m lucky. So sometimes…Stardust had 175 paintings in it. Not all of them full-blown. Some of them were small, quite small, but it still took that was a year and a half, two years of work.

Jesse: Wow. Then in 2006, you worked with George R.R. Martin on his book, A Storm of Swords, which included 75 of your illustrations. I’ve heard he’s a bit eccentric, but a very nice guy-

Charles: Oh, really fun.

Jesse: I wondered, what was it like to work with him?

Charles: He was very easy. He was always willing to help, but he was always on tour. So you couldn’t track him down. And sometimes you’d be like, you be doing a drawing. And you’d have to read..this was the third book in the series. They’re all very large, long books. And you’d have to read all of those to get some of the character descriptions. And they were drawing, say The Hound, the guy playing it, or whatever. And he’s got a scar on his face, what side of the face did he have the scar on? And George would be on tour and he wouldn’t be communicating because he had no official Bible, what they call a Bible. So after a while I went, well, if it’s not on the right side they can flip it, digitally flip it. But he was really fun. It’s not quite the world I want to live in, but it was an interesting project. I spent about four years on the thing.

Jesse: Wow. In 2003, you collaborated with World Fantasy Award-winning author, Charles De Lint who you’ve worked with a few times. You worked on A Circle of Cats that year. And then at the 10th annual Spectrum Awards, you were awarded the gold award for Best Book Art. So how does it feel to be so well-respected among your peers?

Charles: It feels really good. Sometimes it’s for the little kid who grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, it’s like, you sit in your studio and you work and you work and you work. And then you go out sometimes, and then you’re confronted by the fact that people have been following your work and being inspired by your work and all that. And it’s not something you really ought to be thinking about when you’re drawing. Because you’re really drawing for yourself, but it’s heartwarming. It’s wonderful. And it’s thrilling, really, so.

Jesse: Do you think you’re ever going to retire, or you just going to keep going?

Charles: No. I was just filling out my Social Security. I’m turning 70 in June. So, but no, I can’t imagine retiring. I mean, I have lots of ideas stored up that I’d like to draw. I’d like to maybe do a few less books and paint some more for myself. But most of these book projects, they seem to be taking longer and longer. The Earthsea. The Book of Earthsea that I illustrated, it took four years and it was in deep collaboration with the writer and it was really fun to get to know her. Because she was a wonderful, wonderful writer and wonderful person and a very acerbic wit.

Jesse: Yeah. So that was Ursula K. Le Guin.

Charles: Yes.

Jesse: And it was the 50th anniversary, I think, of the first time they published it? So you’ve worked with many of the top fantasy authors of our time. I guess if you could travel back in time, what fantasy author from the past would you like to work with?

Charles: Oh, Dunsany. I think that’s really the one that I can think of. I love reading. It’s really interesting process now to read some of these books, beautiful books that were written in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And they’re written for a different world and you really have to slow your clock down to read them. Because a lot of times they use a lot of adjectives. It’s not quick, immediate reads and sometimes that’s good to do instead of, renting or downloading a 12-part TV series, and watching it in one day. It’s like, “Savor it.”

Jesse: So in 2009, I saw your name literally every day. My daughter became infatuated with your book, Blueberry Girl, that you worked on with Neil Gaiman. And it remains one of my daughter’s favorite books. She’s 14 now, but she still loves your work. So have you found it to be the case that a certain book that you worked on resonates with people more than others?

Charles: There are some, yes. Some that have been noticed more. That was just an amazing project because I think it’s an 18-line poem that has no protagonist, whatsoever. And it was beautiful and very poetic. And I didn’t want to take away from any of that, but it’s a book and you have to sort of try to put in a protagonist that will move the reader through it. And it was a long, conceptual birthing in that book. But once it was done, I watched people read it in my pencil form, very finished pencil, and women especially would be in tears. So, I went, “Okay. I’m doing it right.” So, and it’s really nice to be associated with some books that people read over and over and over again.

Jesse: I think you have your first novel, The Queen of Summer’s Twilight in 2019…you have it available to read for free on your website. Why did you decide to allow readers free access to the book?

Charles: Why not?

Jesse: You don’t see this often.

Charles: No, no. And not that many people still will have read it. But it’s there if you want to do it. I will probably self-publish that sometime this year or early next year, to get it into print. It’s a book that just started cascading in my head, and it was a long story and I couldn’t stop writing. I would come into the studio and say, “Well, I’ll just do a little bit of work.” And two or three hours later, and 1000 words, I’d be like, “Oh my God, here I go.” But it was a story that was, I guess I would call it a gift from whatever it was from.

And it was something I needed to do. I wrote it right after I’d done another book called The Greenwood, that is a combination of graphic narrative illustration and text. And no editor ever got it, they couldn’t understand why you’d want to do that. And I just thought it was a wonderful thing. And I was supposed to publish that through a company called Tachyon, a really nice publisher. So we’ll see, it’ll be sort of a kick-starter because they can’t afford to pay me to do all the drawing, but they will be the fulfillment. They will publish it and ship it and mail it, which is all good because I’m really crappy at shipping and mailing stuff. I want to draw.

Jesse: Well, when you start the kick-starter, let us know and we’ll put it on our Facebook page. And so I guess the last question I wanted to know about digital art, because I’m working on the show Enchanted, which will be our big fantasy exhibition this summer at the Museum. And going through the list of artists, I assumed that a lot of the modern artists would be working with digital. In fact, actually it was very few. Most work in traditional media. So I wondered if you have worked at all with digital? And how do you see digital art affecting the future of fantasy illustration?

Charles: Have you got a couple hours? I don’t use digital art. I use… As I get older my eyesight gets a little more blurry every day. I usually have agreements with the publisher, for them to scan in all the artwork and then send it to me. And I can zoom in on a face where I’ve dropped a bit of paint on it and needs to be gone. I’ll just digitally get rid of it. I work in a transparent medium. It’s not really watercolor, FW colored inks. The only way to get rid of a splotch of color on a face or a body or a hand is to use something opaque. And it always looks so obviously there, it drives me crazy. But in Photoshop, boom, boom, it’s done. I know a lot of artists that work in digital, but every art director I know that talks about it, wants digital because they can change it really easily.

And this is not my job. I don’t want to change it. We agree on a picture and I paint that picture, I don’t want to make the background red or yellow or green or orange for them. That’s what I’ve done. And this is what you get. And also I remember in the early ’80s working on a Spider-Man story so that I could make the money to fly to London, to go to the Tate Gallery and sit in front of The Lady of Shalott, and the plus was Millais’ Ophelia was right on the other side of the door, and see the original.

And when you see an original is like, you’re having a conversation with the artist, whether they’re dead or alive or whatever it is. But you can really… That’s why they’re at museums. So you can go and see that. And anytime I’m in a show that they have a beautifully printed cibrachrome of a digital piece, I’m not having that conversation. It’s a shiny surface. It doesn’t work for me. And I’m old fashioned and I’ll die and it’ll be okay. So some people love it. So I let them love it.

Jesse: Well, that’s all the time we have for now. Thank you, Charles, for all the great work you’ve done. For more information, check out Charles’s website at greenmanpress.com. That’s greenmanpress.com. And our own websites NRM.org, illustrationhistory.org and visit the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies at rockwell-center.org. As always, don’t forget to subscribe, to be notified for the latest content. This has been a production of the Norman Rockwell Museum.

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