- Photo provided by Klaus Scherwinski
During WonderCon 2010, I had the pleasure of meeting with Merrill Hagan and Klaus Scherwinski, the creative team behind the upcoming G.I. Joe: Origins #15. Merrill Hagan has written a few comics for Marvel and DC, and also has an extensive background as a writer and producer for various television projects. Klaus Scherwinski drew the Beachhead issue of Origins, and has been doing a variety of illustration work for a few years now.
For an interview with the first half of this creative team
read here.
Now let me ask Klaus a few questions. Klaus, how did you get started drawing?
Oh my god. I was sixteen, and we got cable in Germany. I got to see a Manga series, or anime you would call it nowadays, it was called "Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs." Like people in space with their ray guns, and I loved it, and the german dubbing was hilarious! The japanese version is kinda weird, and the English dubbing they remade it. In English it's cool, and in German it's cool and hilarious! The people doing the voice acting were so fantastic. So, I started drawing that. I took stills from the TV set. Back in the 90s I could only take stills for 5 minutes, otherwise I would risk the band rubbing through.
The VHS tape?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I tried to copy all the designs they had. I can still draw characters from this series to this day. I can draw anything from that series. I could draw any vehicle, there weren't that many but still I could draw the vehicles, I could draw all the characters. I drew them all in comics and showed them to my classmates and they loved it. And so, I made up more, and more, and more, and that's how I got into drawing regularly, with an eye towards entertaining people. If they had fun, I had fun drawing it.
Merrill Hagan explained that G.I. Joe: Origins #15 is only your third comic book, is that right?
This is actually my sixth full comic book. I started out in 1999 doing a three issue mini series, 24 pages each, for a small German publisher. And I wrote it myself unfortunately. Now I have writers to do that for me. While I have some good ideas for stories, scenes, and some characters, telling a whole story, beginning middle and end is a whole different matter. So, I started doing that, and I got zero Euros out of that, Zero Deutsch Marks actually because it was before the Euros. I got lost of experience and I went to conventions for the first time ever in my life, age 20. Here people go to conventions being 8 years old or 12, but they weren't around and there still aren't many in Germany. I got there so I made the connections to the American pen and paper role playing game market. From there it just took me to comics.
How did you get involved with IDW?
When I first came to San Diego Comic Con in 2000, I didn't get any jobs because I wasn't, frankly, good enough. Which is totally okay. I knew that beforehand but I knew I had some things going for me. There were still some mistakes still, but I was on the right track. That's the message that I got there, but also I met other artists. Artists like Vatche Mavlian, who did "Spider-Man/Daredevil", and "Spider-Man & Wolverine" for Marvel Comics later on. We clicked. We sat next to each other and we exchanged portfolios and looked at the stuff. I was amazed with what he was doing. He looked at my stuff too and it was great. Now we're good friends and he lives in Toronto, and I live in Germany. At one point he worked for Star Wars Tales and Chris Ryall was the editor at the time, at Dark Horse. Then Ryall switched to IDW and at one point Vatche recommended me to Chris Ryall. He gave me the first jobs, working on Transformers, doing covers for the very first series that I did. That's how I got involved.
Can you tell us a little about your history with G.I. Joe?
Germany is a reprint market basically where they just translate the comics, but they didn't much translate G.I. Joe. They did change the format. It was horrible. In tenth grade I got to Munich and to comic stores. I could buy comics there. Then my father, he knew I wanted to read American comics, like in their real language and all. I loved English, always have, always will, and I loved comic books. So this was like the perfect amalgamation of my two hobbies. So he brought home a stack of comics, Green Lantern, G.I. Joe, and two or three others. He didn't know what he was buying there. He had no idea. He just would like grab something, and they were expensive too, because they were imports and all that. The kiosk at the train station would just mark them up. Anyhow, he brought this home and I had seen a couple of G.I. Joe episodes on American television that we had got in Germany. We got cable as I mentioned, so I could get SkyOne and see G.I. Joe. I was like, "Oh my god, it's a series with laser guns! and people solving everything through conflict! Awesome!" It was so exciting to see that. And then there were actually the advertisements in between the shows, before and after the cartoon, and I was like, "oh, you can buy toys for that?!?!" Indeed, my parents wouldn't allow me to buy these toys, because it was like warfare and Germans aren't good at that anymore. In Germany it was called Action Force. It was hard to get that stuff anyhow, and it was expensive, so no way of me buying any of the toys. But, I loved the cartoon, and my father had brought home those books. It was issue 134, it was one by Larry Hama, and by Andrew Wildman from England. It showed Duke blasting through those B.A.T.s. on the cover. It was like fantastic, it was a war scene in the Pitt, it had a double page spread going on, with people shouting having their special terminology, like "hey, first shirt, blah blah blah," because he was a Sergeant or something. I read this issue like a hundred times, because it was one of the very few copies of American comics that I owned, and I loved it. And that got me hooked on G.I. Joe, but I couldn't get many more of the G.I. Joe books in the following years and then they stopped submitting SkyOne to the cable network so I had a hard time catching up. Then DDP picked up G.I. Joe and I tried to follow that but then the artwork in that didn't strike me. I was like, "this looks weird." There was some weird stuff in there. There was some writers that had the artist draw like fifteen panels on one page, so he had like no chance of making that look good. So I didn't follow it. Then at one point IDW got the license and I was working on Transformers already and Andy Schmidt offered me the chance on G.I. Joe. I was pestering Chris Ryall already, like, "I want to work on G.I. Joe..."
- G.I. Joe #131
The coolest thing about that is Andrew Wildman... I was working on Transformers with Simon Furman, and he's good friends with Andrew Wildman, and so I got to know Andrew Wildman via the Internet. We clicked. It was awesome keeping in touch and I had totally forgotten that he had done any G.I. Joes. When I got the job on G.I. Joe I took out all my old G.I. Joe books that I had and the very first one was drawn by Andrew frickin' Wildman! I went on the interweb and there was an auction that he was doing selling artwork from that precise issue. I was in touch with him so I bought, for something like 50 euros, or some ridiculous low price, I bought one page of this original book.
Oh that's great. Great story.
Okay, do you have a favorite side? Joe versus Cobra?
I like them both. I think you can't really separate them. One wouldn't be cool without the others. Cobra must be cool and hardcore. Joes must be over the top and just go into the fray and just battle them and thwart their plans. It has to happen, but then Cobra has to win every once in a while.
Do you have a favorite character?
I would say Duke. Duke was in this original book that I bought. He was featured prominently in that book, and in the back they had all the information about Conrad S. Hauser and how he became a Joe and all that. So, I read this, it was a long text, for me especially not knowing English that well. So I read this a couple times, looked up stuff in the dictionary. So I kind of gravitate towards him because he's the one I really got to know.
Do you want to work on more G.I. Joe comics in the future? and what would be your favorite character or storyline to draw?
That's pretty hard now. I would love to draw more Joes. Before the Snow Job issue was finished Andy Schmidt already alluded that I could take a two parter if I wanted to, but at that point I was still booked out for 3 months. Now my schedule has lightened up a little because one fantasy book illustration project in Germany was pushed back until the end of the year. So there might be things coming up. But I also have one or two ideas I want to pitch myself, but together with an author because I can't write. I just have ideas for scenes. I can't go into that, it's tricky... but one scene would explore torture. Like it's a big things now, American and Iraq, and all that. I would like to explore that theme a little. Not too much, just a little. Indeed, Cobra would torture. The Joes could also, but they're American so they normally wouldn't. G.I. Joes are like the idealized American forces. I would wish that the world was like that simple, and there were American, cool, like Army agent types. But, yeah, I think torture would be interesting.
Have you read the Cobra mini series?
Not yet, but I will.
That was an excellent series. Maybe if they open it up to allow other creators like yourself to do things with it, it would fit in well I would think.
Yeah. I did this Spotlight: Wheelie, for Transformers with Simon Furman. That worked out pretty well. Lots of people gave lots of feedback. Although he was like the most despised character ever, people hated him, we made him cool. I hope I can come up with somebody, maybe Merrill, on another Joe book where we can produce the book in a Marvel style way. So I just get a rough script, then do the layouts, and then he comes in again and changes stuff around, adds word balloons. I would love to work that way.
Merrill : With Snow Job too, I mean he's a popular character, but he never really had a big role in the cartoon. This is the first... well you would know better than me... but I think this is the first Snow Job spotlight.
Snow Job has only had minor roles in the cartoon, as far as I know. So, to be able to have a feature Snow Job story is very exciting.
Merrill : I think he comes off kinda bad ass in it. Ha, ha, ha!
I'm really looking forward to it because I don't think you get to see Snow Job the sniper in comics or cartoons before. This is going to be an exciting book and it's great to see you bringing this to a new modern audience.
Merrill : In someways it feels more like a throw back to the 80s. Not in a bad way. It's like, IDW stuff seems a little darker in general. This is not quite as dark as some of the other IDW stuff.
Right but it's a lot of fun. I would love to draw more Snow Job, definitely. He has a couple cool scenes in this. I would love to know more about him. Have him interact more with the other Joes.
Merrill : Yeah, you definitely get a sense of a little bit of tension between some of the other Joes and Snow Job.
Rightly so. That's so good. Conflict makes for great stories.
Merrill : Like on the Larry Hama card Snow Job was a liar and there's a little bit of a sense of that. You don't know if what he's telling you is true all the time.
And he's a bit cocky.
Merrill : He's very cocky. Very full of himself. I just think he's a lot of fun. I really would like to see more Snow Job. We had a great time with him. There's a lot I'd like to do with Joe.
There was one other thing that I've been meaning to ask you Klaus, something that Merrill mentioned. You really bring a level of detail to your work, with showing very realistic scenes with a lot of different things going on. Do you feel that's true, that you convey a lot of details in your comics?
I try to. I'm like a total detail fanatic. I just like add, and add, and add, but there's the always danger of over rendering. I've been teaching illustration now for a couple years and I have to tell people, "Guys, detail is not important. It's depth and atmosphere." Detail is just the icing on the cake, not the main thingy. The other two pillars are much stronger. It's like you build a house and and it's depth and atmosphere, and good story telling indeed. And then the ornamentals on that are all the details. People don't look at the house and say, "Oh look at the strong pillars" they say, "Look at the ornamentals" and that's always the danger there. So you wouldn't want that. And I try to put verisimilitude in my books, like make him appear realistic. Like Snow Job's costume is modeled on arctic rangers actually from the US forces wearing those white jackets, that are very wide, that would hide your form, your shape. You want to do that. Those shoulder pouches, when he's lying as a sniper on his belly you can't use anything form his pockets on his pants really so you have to have pockets up here so you can take bullets out or another rifle scope or whatever.
Merrill : The thing that I think is awesome about Klaus's work is that some people try to get super hyper-detailed like Bryan Hitch, or they run the Ed McGuiness way. Klaus is a pretty awesome mix, like right there in the middle.
I was saying that I think what's really great about IDW is that they're bringing creators on to their properties that are true fans of the work that they're doing. I think that's great to see. And Klaus, I think that your cake has just the right amount of icing. It's very realistic.
Thank you. Let's see what the people say.
G.I. Joe: Origins #15 goes on sale May 26th, 2010.
You can find out more about Klaus Scherwinski at
www.klausescherwinski.de.
